













■iP >*V1-. *> v .;••- c- £ \>1 






: x * 












v.. 







/°«- 















^ 
O 



^> * 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 









^o* 






^ 






<$> * a 















* * 



http://www.archive.org/details/shorthistoryofro01parm 



HISTORY OF ROME 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



A SHORT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 

A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND 

A SHORT HISTORY OF FRANCE 

A SHORT HISTORY OF GERMANY 

A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN 

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA 



A SHOUT HISTORY 



OF 



ROME AND ITALY 



BY 

MAKY PLATT PARMELE 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1901 






k<* 



% 



COPYKIGHT, 1901, BY 

CHARLES SCRLBNERS SONS 
Published, September, 1901 



Bequest 

Albert Adsit demons 

Aug, 24, 1038 

(Not available for exchange) 



THE CAXTON PRESS 
NEW YORK. 



PREFACE. 

These are two kinds of art. In one the 
ideal comes into form by accretion, in the 
other by elimination. You may lavishly 
apply pigments until you have built up your 
ideal, or you may cut away superfluities 
until you have reached it. History may 
partake of either or both of these methods. 
It may be presented as a sumptuous picture 
on a generous canvas, rich in color and be- 
wildering in detail, or it may be reached like 
a cameo, by cutting away every shining 
particle which obscures the clear simple out- 
line, with perhaps just a sparing use of pig- 
ment here and there to intensify the relief. 
Whichever method be chosen, failure is al- 
ways imminent, and the difficulties prodigi- 
ous. But as a general proposition, it is 
easier to say things, than to refrain from 
saying them, especially if one's theme be 
"Rome and Italy," when no fragment seems 
superfluous. 



VI PREFACE. 

To tell the story of the Italian peninsula 
from the days of iEneas to the present time, 
in less than three hundred small pages, is 
not an easy task ! Two daemons perpetually 
attend you, one whispering that you are omit- 
ting matter essential to the narrative ; the 
other insisting that you are amplifying en- 
tirely too much. To which of these counsel- 
lors the writer has given too much heed, 
must be left to the reader to judge. 

M. P. P. 

New Yokk City, 
June, 1901. 



CONTENTS. 

HISTORY OF ROME. 

Chapter I. 

Natural Conditions of Peninsula of Italy— Aboriginal 
Races— -Value of Ancient Legends and Traditions. 



PAGE 

1 



Chapter II. 

Legendary Story of ^Eneas— Romulus and Remus- 
Founding of City of Rome— Rape of the Sabines 
—Beginning of Roman Institutions, Military, Po- 
litical, and Social— Numa Pompilius— Founding 
of Sacerdotal System 9 

Chapter III. 

Tullus Hostilius— Ancus Marcius— The Horatii and 
the Curiatii— Patrons and Clients— Patricians and 
Plebeians 18 

Chapter IV. 

Tarquinius Priscus— The Cloaca Maxima— The Forum 
Boarium — The Circus Maximus— Influx of Etrus- 
can Usages— The Good Servius— Changes in the 



Vlll COKTEtfTS. 

PAGE 

Constitution— The Comitia Centuriata— Building 
of the Wall— Death of Servius — Tarquinius Su- 
perbus— Story of Lucretia— Passing of the Regal 
Period 25 

Chapter V. 

Survey of Contemporaneous Conditions— Organization 
of the Republic — Conspiracy and Execution of 
Sons of Lucius Junius Brutus — Office of Dictator 
created — King Porsenna the Champion of King 
Tarquin — Battle at Lake Regillus— Castor and 
Pollux Interpose — Renewed Oppression of Ple- 
beians — Law of Debt — Secession to Sacred Hill — 
Conditions of Return — Tribunes Created — Corio- 
lanus — Spurius Cassius and His Agrarian Law — 
Cincinnatus 32 

Chapter VI. 

Exodus of the Fabian Gens — Distress of Plebeians 
and Cession of Aventine Hill — Appius Claudius . 
His Methods and His Suicide— Anarchy — The De- 
cemvirs Created — Terentillian Law — The Twelve 
Tables — Appius Claudius the Decemvir — Story of 
Virginia — Overthrow of Decern virate — Another 
Secession to Sacred Hill — Demands of Plebeians 
— Restoration of Triumvirate — Canuleian Law — 
Compromise and what it Effected — Tricks and 
Evasions 42 

Chapter VII. 

Ancient Prediction — Camillus — Fall of Veii — The 
Gauls in Etruria — Brennus— Rome Occupied by 



CONTENTS. IX 



Gauls — Manlius Holds the Capitol — Rome a Ruin 
—Renewed Sufferings of Plebeians — How Manlius 
was Rewarded for His Valor — The Licinian Roga- 
tions—Inflexible Fidelity of Two Tribunes — Their 
Use of the Right of Veto — Advice of Camillus — 
Victory — Lucius Sextius First Plebeian Consul — 
The Temple of Concord— Steps Leading to Equal- 
ization of Rights — Meaning of the Long Strug- 
gle 51 



Chapter VIII. 

Contemporaneous Conditions — Greece and Carthage — 
Roman and Greek Political Conditions Compared 
— The Larger Purpose Manifest in Human Events 
— All of Italy Subject to Rome — Roman Adminis- 
trative System — The Absence of the Associative 
Principle in the Greek Political System — Review 
of Events in Greece from Persian Invasion to 
Death of Alexander — Tarentum — Pyrrhus — Rome 
Enters Great Arena by way of Sicily — The Mam- 
ertines — First Punic War — Regulus — Sicily a Ro- 
man Province — Hannibal — Cannae — Macedonia 
joins Hannibal— Carthage Destroyed and Mace- 
donia Subjugated 58 



Chapter IX. 

Causes Leading to a Social War — A Crisis and the 
Gracchi — Oriental and Greek Influences — Condi- 
tions Produced — Jugurthine War — Sulla — Pom- 
pey — The Game of Politics — The Players — Cat- 
iline's Conspiracy — Caius Julius Caesar — His 



X COKTEKTS. 

PAGE 

Campaign in Gaul— The First Triumvirate— Mark 
Antony the Tribune — Plan for Caesar's Downfall 
— He Crosses the Rubicon — Pharsalia — Pompey's 
Death and Caesar's Triumph — Adulation Followed 
by Suspicion— The 15th of March . . . 72 

Chapter X. 

Second Triumvirate — Antony Disgraced — Actium — 
Octavius Becomes Augustus Caesar — Conditions of 
Period— Golden Age in Literature — Jesus Christ 
Born at Bethlehem — From Augustus to Nero — 
Christian Persecutions — Vespasian — Fall of Jeru- 
salem — Trajan — Marcus Aurelius 85 

Chapter XL 

Stoicism — Epicureanism — Neo-Platonism — Christi- 
anity 94 

Chapter XII. 

Commodus— Emperors Appointed by the Praetorian 
Guards — Septimius Severus— Caracalla — Heliogab- 
alus — Christian Persecutions Under Decius — 
Zenobia — Empire Divided by Diocletian — More 
Persecutions — Constantine Adopts Christianity for 
the Empire — Capital Removed to Byzantium — 
Organization of Church — Bishop of Rome — The 
Religion of Jesus converted into a Political Engine 
— The Huns — Division into Eastern and Western 
Empire — The Visigoths — Alaric in Rome — Ataulf 
— Rome Vanishing Before Vandals — Its Capture 
by Genseric — Odoacer Sovereign of Italy 102 



CONTENTS. XI 

HISTORY OF ITALY. 
Chapter I. 

PAOB 

Rome a Spiritual Empire — Division into Eastern and 
Western Church— Gotliic Christianity — Theodoric 
— Rome Recovered by Justinian — Lombard Invas- 
ion — Mahommedanism — Charles Martel 115 

Chapter II. 

Alboin's Ambition — What Came of It — The Donation 
of Pepin— Charlemagne— Becomes Successor of 
the Caesars— Division of His Empire — Italy Joined 
to Germany — Parentage of European States— Em- 
perors and Popes — Hildebrand — Growth of Eccle- 
siastical Power — The Normans in Italy — Roger 
Guiscard, King of Naples and Sicily — Free Cities 
— Barbarossa Destroys Milan — The " Lombard 
League " 125 

Chapter III. 

Urban IV. invites Charles of Anjou to wear the Crown 
of Naples — Conradin — The Sicilian Vespers — 
Guelfs and Ghibellines — Italian Cities — Venice — 
Florence — Dante — Pisa and Count Ugolino — The 
Crime of the Fourth Crusade — Venice Decked in 
Spoils — In Conflict with Genoa 137 

Chapter IV. 

Changes Wrought by 13th Century — Innocent III. — 
Avignon and the "Babylonian Captivity" — Co- 
lonnas and Orsinis at Rome — Petrarch — Rienzi the 
Tribune — Becomes Rienzi the Tyrant — Is Slain. . 148 



Xll C0KTE2STTS. 



Chapter V. 

PAGE 

Venice and Genoa at War — Marco Polo a Prisoner in 
Genoa — How the Story of Cathay was Written — 
Genoa's Humiliation — In Charge of Milan— Com- 
bination against Milan — Venice and Her ' • Council 
of Ten" — Marino Faliero — Francesco Foscari — 
Beginnings of Italian Art and Poetry — Popes and 
Cardinals at War — Three Infallible Popes — Jo- 
anna, Queen of Naples 157 

Chapter VI. 

Savoy Becomes a Duchy — Amadeus, First Duke of Sa- 
voy, is made Pope — The Condottieri — Carmagnola 
— His Rise and Fall — Francesco Sforza 169 

Chapter VII. 

Cosmo de' Medici — Constantinople Captured — Lorenzo 
de' Medici— What He Did for Florence — Art and 
Morals — Undermining Influences — Vicious Moral 
Standards — The State a Mechanism, not an Organ- 
ism — Ready to Fall Apart — The Church the Source 
of Corruption— Its Debasement — Pagan Culture — 
Savonarola — Machiavelli— " The Prince" — Death 
of Lorenzo 176 

Chapter VIII. 

1492 and Its Triumphs— How Rodrigo Borgia Be- 
comes Alexander VI. — Fails to Buy Savonarola — 
Duke of Milan Invites French Invasion — Its Re- 
sults — A Spiritual Revival in Florence — The Holo- 
caust—Savonarola's Prestige Begins to Fail — The 



CONTENTS. Xlll 

PAGE 

End — Tendency Toward Unity — Impending 
Changes — Cause of Coming Downfall — Invasion 
by Louis XII. — Spain Reaps the Benefit — Cesare 
Borgia— Ravenna — Julius II. as a Patron of Art — 
Leo X. — How He Intended Paying for Decora- 
tions in St. Peter's — Martin Luther — Charles V. . . 191 

Chapter IX. 

Italy a Battlefield for Aliens, 1530-1796— Genoa a Re- 
public Again — Philip II. — Growth in Savoy— The 
Waldenses — Louis XIV. — Duke of Savoy Becomes 
■ ' King of Sardinia " — How Napoleon Bonaparte 
Became a Frenchman — A Slumbering Volcano in 
France — The Catastrophe and Passing of Absolut- 
ism in France — Napoleon Bonaparte — All Italy 
His— Establishes Republics — Rome Sacked by the 
Germans — New Genoese Republic — Fragmentary 
Italy — Gregorian Calendar — Persecution of the 
Waldenses — War of the " Spanish Succession " — 
How the Duke of Savoy Became " King of Sar- 
dinia" — How Napoleon Bonaparte Happened to 
be a Frenchman — Imprisoned Forces in France — 
An Object Lesson in America — Its Result in 
France — Napoleon Bonaparte in Italy — How He 
Broke "The Chains of the Oppressed" — The 
Pope in Exile— The New Order of Things 204 

Chapter X. 

The Passing of Napoleon— Austria a Liberator in 
Italy — Political Parties — Demands for Constitu- 
tional Freedom— Leo XII— The Ghetto— Duke 
of Modena — The Teachings of the Sanfedesti — A 



XIV COKTEETS. 

PAGE 

Constitutional King in France — Charles Albert 
Becomes King of Sardinia — Mazzini Disappointed. 217 

Chapter XI. 

Gregory XVI.— Pius IX.— Revolution in the Air— Fall 
of Monarchy in France — Charles Albert Leads a 
Rebellion against Austria — Pius IX. Takes Refuge 
with the King of Naples at Gaeta— Defeat of 
Charles Albert at Novara — Abdication — Victor 
Emmanuel II. King of Sardinia— General Haynau 
— Aspirations toward Freedom Put Down in 
Naples— Revolt in Hungary— A Roman Republic 
—Its Fall— Return of Pius IX. to Rome 226 

Chapter XII. 

The "Re Galantuomo" — Count Cavour — Clerical and 
Anti-Clerical Policies — Maximilian in Milan — 
Crimean War — Sardinia Joins Allies — Strained 
Relations with Austria — England Refuses to In- 
tervene — Louis Napoleon's Price for Intervention 
— How Victor Emmanuel Won the Hearts of His 
People 237 

Chapter XIII. 

Louis Napoleon's Dramatic Promise — Magenta — A 
"King of Italy" — Solferino — Venetia and the 
' ' Peace of Villaf ranca " — Italy Betrayed — Mo- 
dena, Parma, and Papal States Annexed— Pius 
IX. and Antonelli— " Italy For Italians "— Ca- 
vour's Difficult Task — King of Naples — His 
Methods — Garibaldi — His Great Achievements — 
A Gift to Italy— Joy at Naples—" Italy Is One " . . 246 



CONTENTS. XV 



Chapter XIV. 

Victor Emmanuel in the Papal Territory— Foreign 
Army Driven Out — Meeting Between the King 
and the Soldier — Garibaldi at Caprera — Cavour — 
His Burdens and His Death — Garibaldi under Dis- 
pleasure of the King — Count Bismarck — Prussia 
Throws off Austrian Yoke— Italy in Alliance with 
Prussia — How Venetia Came Back to Italy- 
Napoleon III. Declares War Against Prussia — 
Sedan — No French Garrison at Rome — Rome's 
Capitulation — "The Prisoner of the Vatican" — 
Law of "Papal Guarantees" — Limits of "Tem- 
poral Sovereignty " Denned — Prince Humbert and 
Margherita — Birth of Son — Amadeus King of 
Spain — Royal Family at the Quirinal 259 

Chapter XV. 

Death of Victor Emmanuel — Death of Pius IX. — Leo 
XIII. — His Pontificate — King Humbert Assas- 
sinated—Nature of the Burden He Bore— The 
"Mafia" at New Orleans — Victor Emmanuel 
III.— A Peninsula Rich in Experiences 271 



BREATH OF ANCIENT ROME 



Proud Symbol of Old Empire, "S. P. 

Q. R.," Still Appears in the 

Italian Capital. 

On the cap of the man who was 
lazily sweeping the dusty Roman 
street I saw a shield with the letters 
"S. P. Q. R.," writes Vladimir Polia- 
koff in the London Daily Telegraph. 
It was midday, the hot rays of the sun 
were beating straight down, and the 
clouds of dust whirled up by the 
man's broom were full of scintilla 1 ting 
particles. 

Suddenly it seemed to me that I 
was looking out upon a wide plain. 
Among the whirls of dust 1 saw ad- 
vancing the compact squares of 
Rome's legions. The helmets, the 
shields and the corselets burned in I 
the sun, and. the spearheads were like! 
sparkling flames. . Over the squares | 
planed the eagles, the world-conquer- j 
ing eagles of Rome, with talons fixed 
firmly in the laurel of the wreaths | 
wound around the bronze tablets with j 
the lettering "S. P. Q. R." 

Senatus Populusque Romanu.«=£&£ ' 
senate and the people of Rome ; the j 
formula of the proud, relentless power f 
which transformed a township on ; 



VlmAu^- 



seven pretty nmocRs into tue capital 
of a world. 

The clouds of dust became denser; 
the legions marched into them and 
disappeared. For a time the eagle* 
continued to fiy overhead, then they, 
too, were swallowed up. Suddenly, 
out of the dust clouds emerged the 
man with the broom. He paused in 
his work ; I asked him for the meaW 
ing of the letters on his cap. Im 
moved his hand in a slow, carelessly 
negative gesture. 

"These letters? Who can tell, 



sign or 



An ancient sign, surely. 



Something connected with the syndic. 
But maybe not . . . An ancient 
sign, surely . . ." Then, all of a 
sudden the lazy man's eyes Hashed. 
He said proudly: "Rome is so old, and 
she is the capital of Christendom." j. 
So, hidden away, the old spirit sur- 
vives. I set out to discover its hiding 
place. The letters S. P. Q. R. I found- 
everywhere — on all municipal build- 
ings, on the uniforms and caps of city 
employees, on tramway cars, even on 
dustbins. But the vision of the eagles 
would not come back. 







HISTORY OF ROME. 



CHAPTER I. 



The peninsula of Italy has more power- 
fully influenced the destiny of the human 
race, in its material aspects, than any other 
spot upon the earth. Bethlehem of Judea 
and Greece have flooded the world, the one 
with spiritual life, and the other with intel- 
lectual splendor ; but working upon a lower 
plane and with coarser implements, Rome 
seems to have been predestined to open up 
the channels through which those streams 
should nourish humanity. Her appointed 
task was to lay the foundations for Christen- 
dom. 

But Rome did not lay the corner-stone of 
modern civilization. She is its corner-stone. 
In the pedigree of nations she is the great 
progenitor, the cause of causes, and must 
ever remain the prodigy among earthly em- 



A HISTORY OF ROME. 

pires. What was the secret of her strength ? 
To what was she indebted for her amazing 
pre-eminence? Not to her geographical posi- 
tion, for she had no sea-port, and in a land of 
exceptional fertility and charm she occupied 
a spot too sterile to support her own people, 
and was surrounded by malarial marshes 
unfriendly to human life. Not to her ances- 
try, for she had none. She did not engraft 
her youthful vigor upon an old pre-existing 
state ; had not, like Persia and Macedon and 
Carthage, the stored riches and experience of 
a parent kingdom with which to build the 
new. We, in America, while glorying in our 
own phenomenal development, should re- 
member that we are not only the heir of all 
the ages, but that we started with a great 
political inheritance, the wisdom and expe- 
rience which Great Britain had been accumu- 
lating for a thousand years. But Rome first 
built her city, then by sheer native force peo- 
pled it, then compelled all of Italy, and final- 
ly all the then existing world, toward the 
centre she had created. And when after 
long ages her temporal sovereignty was 
slipping from her weakened hands, she gath- 
ered to herself a spiritual sovereignty, and 
remains to-day the supreme ruler over the 



HISTORY OF ROME. O 

hearts and consciences of a large part of 
mankind in an empire which knows no geo- 
graphical limits. There may be great world- 
powers in the future, but will there ever be 
one which will leave such a heritage of 
strength and political wisdom as did that 
empire with its throne upon the seven hills 
of Rome ? Will there ever be another which 
even while it is perishing can, out of its su- 
perabundant strength create such a group of 
world-powers, and then bequeath to future 
ages a judicial system so just, so wise, so per- 
fectly adapted to the needs of human soci- 
ety, that after 2,000 years will still stand the 
model for the legislation of Christendom % 

In what sort of a cradle was this giant 
nourished ? What were the influences which 
shaped its childhood? and what the attri- 
butes which enabled it to establish such a 
dominating influence in the world's affairs? 

The cradle for the Roman Empire was 
commenced in the earliest geologic ages, 
and was fashioned by titanic forces. It was 
circumstances seemingly quite fortuitous 
which sent that narrow peninsula jutting 
out into the sea and straggling toward the 
East. A few more, or a few less volcanic 
upheavals and there would have been a dif- 



4 HISTORY OF ROME. 

ferent Italy, and then a different history of 
Rome, and hence of the world. But when 
Nature paused, when she had fashioned that 
curious leg-shaped strip of land with its 
rigid skeleton of mountains ; when she had 
made it strong, rock-ribbed with her most 
ancient limestone, so that the elements and 
the sea would strive in vain to devour it, 
and then when she had sprinkled the de- 
pressions and basins with rich black loam 
which would blossom into matchless beauty 
beneath the sun's rays, she had determined 
the course of history as we read it to-day. 
And that region between the Alps and the 
Apennines, watered by streams from both 
ranges, the most fertile garden spot in 
Europe, was that the chosen site for the 
future lords of Italy and of the world % Not 
at all. On the Tiber, back from the sea, in 
the most uninviting spot in the whole penin- 
sula, where the earth rises in seven irregular 
hills, there was the rough limestone cradle 
of the future Roman Empire. 

When and how this land was first occu- 
pied by man we may never know, nor whence 
came the aboriginal races which existed there 
at the early dawn of the European day. 
But when it emerges from the region beyond 



HISTORY OF ROME. O 

the verge of history there were many strongly 
contrasting tribes crowded upon the narrow 
peninsula, separated from each other by the 
natural ramparts of the Apennines, and the 
no less effectual wall of race antipathy and 
language. These may be roughly divided 
into the Pelasgians — with marked Hellenic 
traits — on the east and south (Magna 
Grsecia), the Oscans, Sabellians, and Um- 
brians, a more indigenous people occupying 
Central, Western, and Northern Italy ; last 
of all the Etruscans, on the western coast, 
the most interesting of the entire group, 
whose origin baffles even conjecture ; the 
remains of their language offering not the 
slightest clew, and leaving them a com- 
panion mystery to that of the Basques in 
Spain and Western Europe. These are the 
chief primitive divisions roughly drawn. 
Latium, of more recent origin, seems to 
have been of both Pelasgian and Oscan de- 
scent ; the Latin language having the same 
Aryan roots and structure as the Greek, but 
with a large vocabulary drawn from the war- 
like Oscans ; from which facts scholars read, 
not that the Pelasgians and Latins were 
descended from the Greeks, but, as is more 
probable, were offshoots of the same parent 



b HISTORY OF EOME. 

stem (Aryan) at nearly the same point, and 
also that at some remote period there was a 
conquest of the Pelasgians by the more 
powerful native Oscans, who then became 
the dominant race. How and why the Pel- 
asgian name Italia should have gradually 
extended from the toe of the peninsula until 
it embraced the whole, may never be known. 
Thus far we stand upon conclusions which 
have the sanction of modern scholarship. 
But now we enter upon a more shadowy re- 
gion — the region of legend and tradition, and 
are told that its men and women are phan- 
toms, its facts fables, and that the fascinat- 
ing narrative which has been the theme of 
poets and has charmed the world for two 
thousand years is only fiction. It was not 
until recently that any serious doubts were 
entertained of the truth of the early history 
of Rome. But in 1811 Niebuhr published a 
book of learned and searching criticism which 
by revealing fatal inconsistencies undermined 
the whole fabric. But skepticism would go 
too far in rejecting the only existing clews to 
this interesting problem. The very existence 
of the tradition, true or untrue, illuminates 
the dark and inaccessible past. It is a reve- 
lation of prehistoric hearts and character 



HISTORY OF EOME. / 

quite as genuine and of more value than the 
records we read in the stratifications of rocks. 
And however discredited we can never tear 
from our histories those first immortal chap- 
ters, if for no other reason than that they 
have been for a period which cannot bo 
measured, an inspiration, setting before men 
heroic ideals of a supreme type. There was 
not a man in Rome, when Christ came into 
the world, who did not know the story of 
Horatius holding the bridge ; nor is there a 
man in London or New York to-day who can 
afford not to know that immortal story. 
Even though it be true that Horatius the man 
never existed, the ideal for which he stood 
did ; and that has a more profound signifi- 
cance. It matters little whether Junius Bru- 
tus did or did not hand his son over to the 
executioners for conspiring with the ene- 
mies of Rome. But it matters much that 
this was the type of civic virtue that prehis- 
toric Rome delighted in, and this throws a 
flood of light upon the genesis of Roman 
character, and the stern, untender, uncom- 
promising nobility of a later historic Rome. 
Regarding the credibility of the legends it 
should be remembered that in that ancient 
world oral tradition was unwritten history, 



8 HISTORY OF ROME. 

and in a state whose very existence depended 
upon the truth of family traditions, it must 
have been cultivated as an art. The entire 
structure, political and social — the chief gov- 
erning body, the Senate — the superior rights 
of the patricians — each and all alike existed 
by and through ancestral claims. So we 
may imagine that the stories upon which so 
much depended were endowed with an im- 
perishable vitality. Besides this, is it not 
inconceivable that a political organism so co- 
herent and consecutive, in which each step 
taken grew out of the one which had gone 
before, could have developed without accu- 
rate knowledge of legislative and historical 
precedents ? We may not believe that Rom- 
ulus was the son of Mars, nor that Egeria 
whispered to Nnma the secret which made 
him the transmitter of the will of the gods. 
But that the main line of development is to 
be traced through the legendary history, we 
may and must believe. 



CHAPTER II. 

The legendary history of Rome begins 
with the flight of iEneas from the burning 
city of Troy, bearing upon his shoulders his 
old father Anchises, and leading his son As- 
canius by the hand. He also carried away 
with him some of the sacred fire from the 
altar of Yesta, which must never be extin- 
guished, for Vesta was the protectress of the 
race ; and the gods had told iEneas that he 
was going to found a mighty nation in the 
West. After long wanderings, described a 
thousand years later by Virgil, he was led 
to the shores of Italy. There he married 
Lavinia, daughter of the King of Latium, 
and in her honor named the city he founded 
Lavinium, and there he reigned over Latium 
and performed many mighty deeds. And 
when one day he disappeared, because the 
gods had taken him, he was worshipped as 
Jupiter Indlges, the god of the country. 
Then Ascanius (or lulus), his son, built a 



10 HISTORY OF ROME. 

new city on a ridge of the Alban hills, which 
he called Alba Longa, and there he reigned ; 
and when Ascanius died, Silvius, son of 
iEneas and Lavinia, also reigned there, as 
did eleven Silvian kings, during the next 300 
years, each of them bearing the surname 
Silvius. 

When Procas, the last of this line, died, he 
left two sons. The younger, Amulius, seized 
the inheritance, and drove away his elder 
brother Numitor. He then killed Numitor' s 
son and heir, and dedicated his daughter, 
Rhea Silvia, to the service of Yesta, to keep 
alive the sacred flame brought from Troy, 
and be a virgin priestess forever. But al- 
though the maiden was safe from mortal 
lovers, the god Mars loved her, and she bore 
him twin boys. The penalty for her offence 
was to be buried alive, and when this was 
done, and the terrible uncle had ordered the 
twins to be thrown into the Tiber, he sup- 
posed the danger to his throne was past. 
But to fight against the gods is not easy. 
The basket containing Romulus and Remus 
floated down the Tiber, and was finally cast 
upon the river bank near the Palatine hill, 
where the babes were nourished by the his- 
toric wolf, and when they had outgrown her 



HISTORY OF ROME. 11 

tender ministrations, were fed by woodpeck- 
ers, creatures forever after sacred to the Ro- 
mans, and finally were sheltered and grew to 
young manhood, in the hut of the herdsman, 
Faustulus. When Nu mi tor one day chanced 
to see the two young herdsmen, he was struck 
by their royal bearing and by their resem- 
blance to his unhappy daughter Rhea Silvia. 
Then when their foster-father told him the 
story of their miraculous preservation in 
infancy, he knew they must indeed be her 
children ; and he declared to them that he 
was their grandfather ; and he told them of 
their mother and of his own wrongs at the 
hand of the wricked Amulius. A mighty re- 
solve came into the hearts of the youths ; 
that they would restore him to his throne, 
and overthrow the wicked usurper ; which 
they did ; and Numitor reigned at last in his 
own kingdom. 

But Romulus and Remus were not content 
to stay in Alba Longa and wait for an in- 
heritance. They determined to return to the 
hills on the Tiber, and there found their own 
city. As each desired to choose the site and 
to give it his name, they appealed to the 
gods to decide, Romulus standing upon the 
Palatine hill and Remus upon the Aventine, 



12 HISTORY OF ROME. 

watching the heavens for an omen. The 
flight of six vultures over the Aventine 
seemed to award the choice to Remus, but 
a moment later twelve appeared over the 
Palatine, and Romulus was the chosen 
founder. He at once commenced to build 
his city, and when the envious Remus 
scornfully leaped over the furrow ploughed 
around it to mark its limits, he slew him, 
and was left alone to found his kingdom. 
When his city was ready he sent word to the 
neighboring tribes that all who were dis- 
tressed or fugitives for any reason might 
find asylum there. So men fleeing from jus- 
tice, slaves escaping from their masters and 
outcasts of all sorts found sanctuary on the 
Palatine, and Rome was filled with men with 
strong arms for its defence. Then Romulus, 
when the neighboring cities scornfully re- 
fused to give their daughters in marriage to 
outcasts and robbers, cunningly invited the 
Sabines, his near neighbors, to come on a 
certain day and witness the games in honor 
of a religious festival. At a given signal 
each man seized a maiden and bore her off. 
To avenge this outrage, known as " The Rape 
of the Sabines," the Sabine cities, of which 
Cures was the chief, made war upon the 



HISTORY OF ROME. 13 

audacious Romans and would finally have 
captured their city had not the Sabine wom- 
en interposed. They now loved their lords, 
and with dishevelled hair and cries and lam- 
entations they rushed down the Palatine 
hill and threw themselves between their 
fathers and husbands ; and there was peace, 
and a league was formed uniting the people 
of Rome and of Cures into one community ; 
it being agreed that Romulus and the Ro- 
mans should remain upon the Palatine, and 
to the Sabines and Tatius their king should 
be assigned the Quirinal, and their city be 
called Quirium. Hence forever after in Ro- 
man records the people are known as " Ro- 
mans and Quirites." The two kings were to 
rule conjointly. But Tatius soon died, and 
Romulus reigned alone. As some of the 
Etruscans, his most powerful neighbors, had 
aided in the war with the Sabines, in reward 
for this they also were assigned to the Cselian 
hill and were given the rights of citizenship. 
Romulus now proceeded to organize his 
kingdom. He divided it into three tribes ; 
Romans, Sabines, and Etruscans, thence- 
forth known as the Ramnes, Tities, and 
Luceres. This was the three-fold founda- 
tion for the Roman state. Each of these 



14 



HISTORY OF ROME. 



main divisions he divided into ten curise, 
and these again were composed of gentes. 
Or to state it more correctly, the gens was 
the family, and was the social unit. The 
curia was an association of families or 
gentes, and ten of these curise formed the 
tribe, of which, as has been already said, 
there were three, and upon this triple foun- 
dation stood the state. These political divi- 
sions were the nucleus which, although mod- 
ified, remained the core of the Roman state. 
Romulus then created a body composed of 
the fathers of the families most distinguished 
in the founding of Rome. These were called 
patres, because they were to the people what 
the father was to the gens, that is High Priest 
and with power of life and death, and were 
also an advisory Council to the King. This 
body was the Roman Senate, one hundred in 
number before the union with the Sabines, 
two hundred after, and later three hundred, 
when the third tribe (Etruscan) was repre- 
sented. Then when Romulus had created a 
military system and divided it into centuries 
and legions (one century to each curia, the 
whole forming a legion), and had classified 
the people into two great orders, one the 
ruling class, and the other the inferior and 



HISTOEY OF ROME. 15 

dependent, lie had laid the foundation for 
Roman institutions, political, military, and 
social. 

As was fitting, the gods now took him, as 
they had his great progenitor iEneas. Dur- 
ing a festival on the Field of Mars, they en- 
veloped the hills in darkness, and when the 
thunder and lightning ceased Romulus was 
gone. His father Mars had carried him to 
Olympus in his chariot, and he was wor- 
shipped as the god Quirinus. 

So now there was no king in Rome, and 
for one year the fathers in the Senate took 
turns in reigning one after another, as 
inlerrex, each for five days, while Romans 
and Sabines quarrelled over the right to 
choose the king. Finally a compromise was 
agreed upon. The king was to be a Sabine, 
but was to be chosen by the Romans. The 
choice fell upon Numa Pompilius, a wise 
and just man. War and plunder had been 
until now the occupation of the people ; 
but Numa was to change all that ; not by 
his own but by divine power. He was be- 
loved by the nymph Egeria, who taught him 
how he might compel Jupiter to reveal to 
him the will of the gods. At first the peo- 
ple would not believe that the gods spake 



16 HISTOET OF ROME. 

through Numa and they mocked him. So 
he invited them to a simple feast. At a cer- 
tain moment he told them Egeria had come 
to visit him ; instantly the water changed 
to wine, the coarse food to delicious viands, 
and the rough benches to couches covered 
with rare and costly stuffs. Then they knew 
it was true that a divine power dwelt in 
Numa, and they accepted him as their king 
and their priest. He taught them to worship 
Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, and the sacred 
rites and ceremonies which must be used, 
the prayers, and the simple offerings of cake 
and milk and the fruits of the ground which 
the gods loved. There were to be priests to 
preside at the altars, but pure virgins to 
keep alive the sacred flame on the altar of 
Vesta; and he created four augurs whose 
duty it was to report the flight of the sacred 
birds, and he appointed a chief "ponti- 
fex," learned in all sacred mysteries, who 
guarded the service and could properly con- 
strue the statutes, and save the people from 
incurring the wrath of the gods, through 
using wrong prayers or neglecting any rites. 
In other words, Numa gathered the diffused 
religious sentiment in the nation into a 
sacerdotal system, and if thereafter, kings 



HISTORY OF ROME. 17 

and magistrates and rulers spake by author- 
ity, it was by virtue of the gods who made 
them the instruments for their will, and the 
channel for their commands. 

The Temple of Janus, which was only 
opened in time of war, was closed during the 
forty-three years of Duma's reign, and all 
peaceful arts were encouraged, and the arti- 
zans were divided into guilds according to 
their occupation ; and the lands conquered 
by Romulus were distributed among the 
poor ; and altars erected to Terminus, the 
god of boundaries, and to Fides, the goddess 
of Faith ; the one to make sacred the rights 
of property, and the other that honor and 
good faith might lie at the foundation of 
Society. Then, his work being done, the 
good Numa died, and was buried on the hill 
Janiculus beyond the Tiber. 



CHAPTER III. 

But Tullus Hostilius, who was next chosen 
by the Senate, was not a lover of peace. He 
feared the Romans were growing effeminate 
and would forget how to fight. He was soon 
engaged in a fierce contest with the Albans. 
At last it became evident that either Rome 
would own Alba, or Alba Rome, and the is- 
sue rested upon the fate of a final battle. 
There chanced to be among the Romans 
three brothers born at one birth, the Horatii, 
and among the Albans three other brothers, 
also of the same age, named the Curiatii. It 
was agreed that a combat between these 
champions should decide the fate of the 
quarrel. In the presence of both armies they 
fought. The three Curiatii were wounded, 
but two of the Horatii were slain. Then, the 
surviving Horatius pretended to fly. Pur- 
sued by the three Curiatii the cunning Ro- 
man looked back, and when he saw his pur- 
suers were well separated, swiftly turned 



HISTORY OF ROME. 19 

upon them and slew them one at a time, 
gathered up their vestments, and was borne 
back in triumph to Rome. But his sister 
loved and was betrothed to one of the Curia- 
tii, and when at sight of his blood-stained 
garment she wept and lamented, Horatius 
in a rage slew her also. The victor was con- 
demned by the judges to be given to the ex- 
ecutioner. But by the law of Rome he 
might appeal from the sentence of the Sen- 
ate to the Roman people, his peers, who, be- 
cause he had saved Rome, now saved him. 
But always afterward the Horatian gens was 
obliged to offer an annual sacrifice in expia- 
tion of this sin. The mighty city of Alba 
Longa was now destroyed, and the conquered 
people were compelled to come and dwell in 
Rome and help Tullus in his wars with Etrus- 
cans and Sabines. But the Albans were not 
like other strangers. Rome was founded by 
an Alban prince, so Tullus admitted many of 
the noble families into the body of the patri- 
cians, the poorer class going to swell the 
number of the common people. But the 
worship of the gods had been neglected, and 
when a plague broke out among the people, 
Tullus remembered his sin, and tried to ob- 
tain a sign from Jupiter. That wrathful god 



20 HISTOEY OF ROME. 

answered his prayer with lightnings, and 
Tullus and all his house were destroyed. 

In the hope of placating heaven, Ancus 
Marcius, the grandson of the good Nuina, 
was now chosen king. He was not unwill- 
ing to fight, for he conquered all of Latium 
between Rome and the sea, and planted a 
colony at the mouth of the Tiber, which he 
called Ostia. But he also restored the pu- 
rity of the service of the gods. He fortified 
the hill Janiculum, where his grandsire was 
buried, and connected it with Rome by a 
wooden bridge over the Tiber. He distrib- 
uted conquered lands among the poor, and 
tried to follow in the footsteps of the great 
Numa. 

The two orders into which Romulus orig- 
inally divided the Roman people were com- 
posed of patrons and clients. Each of the 
early leading families or gentes had gathered 
about itself numerous servants and depend- 
ants, thus making a community of lords and 
vassals. The patrons, or lords, were members 
of the three tribes, and hence of the body- 
politic, while their clients had nothing what- 
ever to do with the state except through their 
private relation to their lords as vassals. In 
the course of time these patrons, or patricii, 



HISTORY OF ROME. 21 

came to be called patricians, as distinguished 
from the patres or senators. They alone 
could make the laws and choose the king. 
They were the Populus Romanus ; and when 
the Roman people are spoken of, it is the 
patricians alone who are designated. Then 
there came into existence a third class, com- 
posed at first probably of unclassified rem- 
nants of the earliest people, swelling into 
great numbers chiefly through the conquest 
of other cities. They were freemen but not 
citizens. They were unlike the clients in that 
they were subject to no lord or patron, and 
like them in that they had no connection 
with the state. These were the plebeians, 
the common people. 

The two orders, patricians and plebeians, 
were in the very nature of things hostile to 
each other, and the history of their struggle 
is the history of early Rome. It was a strug- 
gle not for supremac}^ but for equality, and 
every concession wrung by the plebeians 
from the patricians was a step toward the 
consummate grandeur attained by Rome ; 
and then every encroachment upon the equal- 
ity thus gained, was another step toward her 
final dissolution. The history of this strug- 
gle maintained for centuries with such mod- 



22 HTST0EY OF ROME. 

eration and such constancy has inscribed it- 
self upon that model of human justice, the 
body of Roman law — composed of enact- 
ments wrung from the patricians ; a record 
which finds its only counterpart in that of 
the British Constitution. Strangely enough 
in the annals of Europe it is England, with 
no drop of Latin blood in her veins, which 
most resembles the Roman state in its per- 
sistent pursuit and attainment of an equality 
of rights for her commons. 

In a state which was growing by conquest 
and whose battles they fought, and in which 
they were numerically superior, the plebeians 
were politically non-existent. 

Let us, if we can, imagine the descendants 
of the Revolutionary and Colonial families 
in the city of ISTew York the ruling class, 
and the entire political efracement of all the 
rest of the people. This will give some idea 
of the conditions in the Roman state. It 
was an aristocracy of birth. The man who 
could not trace his lineage to the founders of 
the nation had not a single right of citizen- 
ship, and his connection with the state was 
simply by sufferance. There was still an- 
other class in Rome, which had neither rights 
nor freedom. These were the slaves, which 



HISTORY OF ROME. 4,6 

had constant accessions to their numbers 
through conquest. The plebeians were not 
slaves. They were personally free ; might 
own property and regulate their own domes- 
tic and municipal affairs in their home upon 
the Aventine, where they dwelt, a separate 
community outside of the city walls — the 
Ager Romanics. Intermarriage or equality 
of any sort, with the dwellers in the city, 
the patricians, was impossible. They were 
subject to the king, and to the laws, and 
must fight the battles of the common country 
when called upon, but with no share in the 
conquered lands, nor the accruing benefits to 
the state. 

Before leaving this subject it will be inter- 
esting to note the traces of the word gens in 
our own language. Gentle, genteel, gentle- 
man, are all among its descendants — and in 
speaking of Jews and Gentiles, it is Jews and 
Roman patricians that are intended. It is 
also helpful to know that in Roman names — 
usually composed of three — the first is the 
personal name, or pramomen, the second 
the name of the gens, the nomen, and the 
third that of the family, the cognomen ; the 
nomen or gens always terminating in ius. 
Thus in Caius Julius Csesar, Caius is the 



24 HISTORY OF ROME. 

individual name, Julius that of the Julian 
gens (descended from lulus or Ascanius), 
and Ccesar the special branch of that gens to 
which he belongs. Every member of the 
Julian gens was a Julius, and of the Corne- 
lian and Horatian, a Cornelius or Horatius. 
Without understanding this, the repetition 
of names found in Roman history is confus- , 
ing. 



CHAPTER IV. 

From the mythical story of Rome we 
have thus far been able to read that Romu- 
lus (meaning strength) stands for the initial 
force which first collected the elements of the 
state; Numa (meaning law) for the estab- 
lishing of religious and civil institutions; 
while the third period under Tullus and 
Ancus, stands for the beginning of the age 
of conquest, by the absorption and assimi- 
lation of neighboring tribes and peoples. 
Now, in the fourth and last regal period, 
there is introduced a foreign influence which 
is to be fatal. The Etruscans, hitherto a 
subordinate element, became the dominant 
race. There is not time to tell how an Etrus- 
can refugee became King of Rome. But such 
was Tarquinius Priscus, who was next chosen 
by the Senate. The Romans and Sabines (or 
the Ramnes and Tities) had until now been 
the controlling races. The third tribe, the 
Luceres or Etruscans, belonged to the curise 



26 HISTORY OF ROME. 

but had never been represented in the Senate. 
Tarquin appointed 100 new Senators from 
this tribe — and also two more vestal virgins, 
raising the number to six. He then under- 
took a still more revolutionary measure. 
There was not an equality of condition 
among the plebeians. While the mass of 
this people was wretchedly poor, some were 
rich and some of noble birth in other lands. 
These he proposed to add to the body of 
patrician gentes, and in the face of fierce 
opposition it was done. Whatever were his 
motives this was in reality an assault upon 
the power of the nobles, and a long step had 
been taken toward centralizing the power of 
the state in the king, and converting an 
oligarchy into an absolute monarchy. The 
condition of the plebeians was unchanged 
and even more wretched than before, for 
upon them fell the task of the great public 
works which still exist as a memorial of this 
reign. At this time water filled the depres- 
sions at the foot of the Quirinal and Palatine 
hills. The Cloaca Maxima, the great drain 
which carried this body of water into the 
Tiber bears witness to-day to the power of 
the man who planned it and the marvellous 
skill of those who executed it. It was com- 



HISTOEY OF ROME. 27 

posed of three concentric arches, forming a 
semicircular vault fourteen feet in diameter. 
Its artificers were doubtless from Etruria, 
where similar works are still found, and so 
perfect was the workmanship that not a 
block has been displaced, and between the 
stones, laid without mortar or cement, it is 
said a knife-blade cannot be inserted, and 
the great cloaca performs its work as thor- 
oughly to-day as it did 2,500 years ago. 
Upon an irregular strip of ground thus re- 
claimed was laid out the cattle market, or 
the Forum Boarium, where later were to 
stand the arches of Titus and of Severus, 
and the Temple of Saturn, of which the 
beautiful fragment still remains. The Cloaca 
Maxima, with its ramifying branches under- 
lying the city, also drained the valley be- 
tween the Palatine and Aventine, and there 
Tarquin laid out a race-course, the Circus 
Maximus, for the chariot-races and Roman 
games ; and on the Capitoline he laid the 
foundations, still existing, for the great 
Temple of Jupiter. But all these works were 
less important than his conquests in Etruria, 
which probably brought an influx of peo- 
ple from that old and exclusively aristo- 
cratic state, bringing with them social and 



28 HISTOET OF ROME. 

religious usages which gave a deep and last- 
ing coloring to those of primitive Rome. 
What Constantinople was at a later time to 
the Russians, that Etruria must have been to 
the Roman, who, with no ancestral splendor, 
was learning his first lesson in sumptuous- 
ness ; for now we first hear of the lictors 
and their ivory chairs and purple togas, and 
with this elevation came the consequent 
degradation and misery of the class below. 
We learn that the plebeians, who built the 
great drain, were, like the Hebrews in Egypt, 
task-workers, and that they frequently 
killed themselves in despair over the tasks 
they were called upon to perform. And so 
when Tarquin the elder fell by the hand of 
an assassin he left a stronger and greater 
Rome, but one which had become a tyranny. 
We cannot dwell upon the circumstances 
which brought the good Servius to the throne. 
His heart seems to have been set upon alle- 
viating the miseries of the plebeians ; and, 
wise as well as good, he saw that this could 
only be done by striking at the very founda- 
tion of the social structure. The only bond 
uniting the entire people was a military one. 
Servius created a new all-embracing order, 
with a classification not tribal, but based upon 



HISTOEY OF ROME. 29 

property. In other words, he gathered all 
the people into a military organization ; an 
elaborately graded system of tribes and cen- 
turies, in which the wealthiest, richly arm- 
ored and with sword and spear were at the 
top, and the poorest, with slings and arrows, 
at the base. This was the Comitia Centuriata, 
or Assembly of the Centuries, a popular 
assembly which joined the plebeians to the 
body politic. It bestowed not power but 
privilege. Some of their order might now 
dwell within the city, and all might meet at 
one extremity of the Forum, while the curiae 
met at the other ; the united bodies on occa- 
sions assembling on the Field of Mars. It 
was a change in the constitution freighted 
with immense consequences, and that it was 
possible for Servius so to defy and limit the 
authority of the aristocratic class, shows how 
despotic had become the kingly power dur- 
ing the previous reign. The chief authority 
had been hitherto vested in the curiae. It was 
the curise which conferred upon the king his 
sovereignty (imperium). He could not make 
a single law without the consent of that body, 
to which also every patrician sentenced to 
death by the king might appeal — as did 
Horatius. Now, in a state always at war, 



30 HISTOKY OF KOME. 

and in which every man was a soldier, there 
had been created a Popular Assembly with 
entire jurisdiction over military affairs. It 
is easy to see that this body was destined to 
absorb into itself every vestige of authority, 
and leave the aristocratic Comitia Curiae an 
empty shell. Having broken down the wall 
of political separation, Servius then built 
another wall of stone and cement which gird- 
led the seven hills, and the people on the 
Aventine, although not within the sacred en- 
closure, shared this protection from hostile 
attack. 

According to the ancient legend the life of 
this benefactor terminated in a cruel tragedy. 
His son-in-law, the son of Tarquinius, claimed 
the throne by right of descent, and caused 
him to be slain. Tullia, the daughter of 
Servius, driving in her chariot to the Forum 
over the dead body of her father and with 
his blood upon her skirts, saluted her hus- 
band — ' ' Hail to thee, King Tarquinius ! ' ' and 
Tarquin the Proud, Tarquinius Superbus, 
the last King of Rome, commenced his reign. 

Unrestricted power was now in the hands 
of a vicious, unscrupulous king, who treated 
both assemblies with contempt, acknowledg- 
ing no restraining authority. He compelled 



HISTORY OF ROME. 31 

the people to work without pay upon the 
temples he was building on the Capitoline 
(the Capitol and Citadel), and so treacherous 
and insolent was he to his own order, as well 
as cruel to the plebeians, that when a terri- 
ble crime was committed by his son Sextus, 
the entire people arose to expel him. This 
act was a cruel outrage upon Lucre tia, the 
daughter of a noble Roman and wife of Col- 
latinus, who was prefect of Rome, and a 
cousin of the king. Lucretia sent for her 
father and for her husband and Lucius 
Brutus his kinsman, and clad in mourning 
garments she told them of the wrong she had 
suffered, and then plunged a knife into her 
own heart. They carried the body and the 
dripping knife to the Forum, and there Bru- 
tus appealed to the people to avenge this 
deed. With one accord they arose. King 
Tarquin and all of his accursed house were 
driven out of the city, and the gates were 
closed upon them. The Roman monarchy 
after 240 years had come to its end (493 B.C.). 



CHAPTER V. 

The world then as now was weaving its 
future, and then, as it has always done, was 
building to-day upon the ruins of yesterdays. 
Two spiritual kingdoms had recently been 
planted in Asia ; one in the south by Budd- 
ha, and another in the East by Confucius. 
The great nations of antiquity were crum- 
bling. Babylon the mighty had just fallen. 
Phoenicia, old and enfeebled, was struggling 
with Assyria. Carthage, that vigorous 
young Phoenician offshoot, was extending 
her sturdy branches along the African coast 
and the Spanish Peninsula. Persia, after 
laying Babylonia low, was girding herself 
for her onslaught upon Greece ; while 
Greece, with her brilliant cities all along the 
shores of the Mediterranean, was serenely 
moving toward her splendid meridian. Sy- 
baris, Paestum, Cumse, Neapolis, on the 
Italian coast, were the abodes of fabulous 
luxury. What cared they whether the bar- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 



33 



barians upon the Tiber were ruled by kings 
or consuls ? The passing of the regal period 
at Rome was an event too insignificant to be 
observed. But Carthage, with her alert trad- 
ing instincts, had even at this early day 
made a commercial league with the Romans. 
The name king had become odious to both 
orders. They chose two chief magistrates, 
who should rule for one year, and these 
should be called praetors, or consuls. Each 
should be attended by twelve lictors bearing 
as a symbol of power the fasces, bundles of 
rods, those with the projecting axe attending 
each consul in turn, the supreme power being 
vested in them alternately. The first con- 
suls chosen were Lucius Junius Brutus and 
Collatinus Tarquinius, the husband of Lu- 
cretia. It was soon discovered that a band 
of patrician youths were plotting for the res- 
toration of King Tarquin. When the young 
conspirators were brought before the consuls 
two sons of Brutus were among them. The 
stern Roman father condemned them with 
the rest, and himself gave the order to the 
lictors to scourge and then behead them with 
the axe. The Senate now decreed that not 
one of the house of Tarquin must remain in 
Rome, and Collatinus, the husband of Lucre- 



34 HISTORY OF ROME. 

tia and one of the chief founders of the Re- 
public, went into banishment with the rest of 
his detested name. 

King Tarquin enlisted the aid of the power- 
ful Etruscans, and many times Rome seemed 
nearly lost. It was to prevent complicity 
with these desperate attempts that there was 
created a new magistrate, who in times of 
great emergency or peril might be elected to 
supersede the consuls, with an absolute au- 
thority from which there should be no ap- 
peal. This was the Dictator. But consul 
or dictator when no longer under the official 
segis might for unlawful use of authority be 
impeached, and suffer like any other citizen. 

It was when King Porsenna, of Clusium, the 
champion of Tarquin, arrived with his army 
at the bridge across the Tiber that Horatius 
performed his immortal act of valor. With 
two others he held the entrance to the bridge 
while it was being broken down behind them. 
Just before the destruction was complete his 
two companions fled back to the city, but he, 
receiving upon his shield the rain of arrows, 
waited until the last plank had fallen, then 
fully armored, leaped into the Tiber, and 
swam to the opposite shore. So a second 
time had a Horatian saved Rome. 



HISTORY OF ROME. 35 

The last and fiercest battle at Lake Regil- 
lus was nearly lost, when suddenly there ap- 
peared two youths, on white chargers. The 
gods had interposed, for these were Castor 
and Pollux, the sacred twins. They turned 
the tide of victory, and the grateful Romans 
erected a temple for their worship in the 
Forum. Tarquin, wearied and disheartened, 
now retired to the Greek city of Cumse, and 
there he died. 

The fourteen years of war since the expul- 
sion of Tarquin had brought utter ruin upon 
the plebeians. Not alone had their farms 
been deserted while they fought, but lying 
outside the city, in the Campagna, as most 
of them did, they had been ravaged by 
hostile bands, their cattle and flocks carried 
off, and homesteads burned. The patricians, 
who had suffered none of these things, had, 
from time to time, loaned them money to re- 
stock their farms, and to keep them from 
starvation. But now that there was peace, 
and they no longer needed the help of the 
people, the mask of friendship was torn off. 
The time had come when their own order 
could be restored to its old supremacy. The 
Roman law of debt was of frightful severity. 
If the debt was not discharged at the ap- 



36 HISTORY OF ROME. 

pointed time, the creditor might sell the 
debtor and all his sons to the highest bidder. 
Or if the father preferred to spare his children 
such a fate, he might be put to death, his 
body be hewed in pieces, and distributed in 
proper proportion among his creditors ; it 
being especially provided, in anticipation of 
some future Portia, that a little more or a 
little. less made no difference. The plebeians 
found that they were becoming the bonded 
slaves of the patricians, on account of losses 
sustained in fighting their battles, and that 
all the rights obtained for them by Servius 
were trampled upon. 

They resolved to bear it no longer. They 
solemnly marched in a body to a hill on the 
Tiber north of Home. There they would 
build their own city and dwell, and leave the 
patricians and their clients and their slaves 
to themselves. This meant the dissolution 
of the Republic. There was consternation in 
Rome. Embassies were sent, offers of con- 
cessions made. The plebeians knew what 
they wanted ; nothing less would satisfy 
them. All debts must be cancelled ; those 
already sold into bondage must have their 
freedom restored ; and two officials must be 
created in their own order, with the authority 



HISTORY OF ROME. 37 

and the desire to protect them from patri- 
cian injustice. The power and the persons 
of these Tribunes, or masters of the tribes, 
were to be sacred and inviolable as those of 
the consuls ; and in matters touching the 
rights of the plebeians, their jurisdiction was 
to extend over the patricians themselves, who 
could be impeached and must stand trial be- 
fore the Assembly of the Tribes. 

Not until the last point was yielded would 
the determined seceders sign the treaty ; and 
the hill where this solemn league was made 
was forever called the Mons Sacer or Sa- 
cred Hill. The bestowal of the power to ar- 
rest legislation shows how desperate was the 
situation of the patricians. By the single 
word veto, "I forbid it," the tribune could 
hold any measure in suspense, and such a 
weapon was conceded only because some- 
thing worse was feared. 

The story of Coriolanus shows how bitter 
was the feeling in his order, and what a diffi- 
cult task it must have been for the more 
moderate spirits to bring about a reconcili- 
ation through such sweeping concessions. 
Ship-loads of corn had been sent by a Greek 
city for the relief of the misery in Rome. 
When it was proposed in the Senate to dis- 



38 



HISTORY OF ROME. 



tribute this among the suffering plebeians, 
the haughty patrician exclaimed, contempt- 
uously, "Why do they ask for corn? 
They have got their tribunes. Let them go 
back to their Sacred Hill, and leave us to 
rule alone ! ' ' The tribunes sternly sum- 
moned Coriolanus to appear before them on 
account of this insolent language. He re- 
fused to appear, and then, enraged at finding 
he was not sustained by the body of the pa- 
tricians, and shaking the dust of the un- 
grateful city from his feet, he went into 
voluntary exile, offered his services to the 
Volscians, the enemies of Rome, and re- 
turned at the head of an army. It is said 
that when his mother met him with bitter 
reproaches he relented, saying, "Oh! my 
mother, thou hast saved Rome, but lost thy 
son ! " then returned to the Volscians to be 
slain for betraying their cause. The story 
is used by Shakespeare for one of his noblest 
dramas. 

Although much had been gained there was 
still one deep-seated cause for poverty, which 
was reducing the most numerous body of 
Roman citizens to beggary. They had not 
land enough to feed them. A tract which in 
the time of the kings had been set apart as a 



HISTORY OF ROME. 39 

royal domain, had, since the patricians re- 
turned to power, been used by them for past- 
urage. When Spurius Cassius, who was 
consul in 486 B.C., proposed an agrarian law, 
which should divide these public lands 
among the people, the patricians, as was 
natural, vehemently opposed it. But Cas- 
sius was determined and powerful, and the 
memory of the Sacred Hill was still fresh. 
It would be better to pass the measure now, 
and make it a dead letter afterward. So 
they bided their time. As soon as the great 
consul's term of office expired, a charge was 
brought against him of treason. This " Agra- 
rian Law," it was said, was only part of a 
wicked design to secure the support of the 
people in making himself king. He was tried 
by the curiae, found guilty, and condemned 
to the death of a traitor, was scourged, then 
beheaded, and his house razed to the ground. 
The young patricians, in their clubs and 
brotherhoods, were always agitators in the 
extreme party of their order, and found great 
entertainment in forays under the cover of 
darkness, when they would commit outrages 
in the plebeian quarter. The ringleader 
among these young aristocrats was Kseso 
Quinctius, son of the great Roman patriot, 



40 HISTORY OF ROME. 

Cincinnatus. After some particularly shame- 
ful act, the plebeian tribune impeached Kse- 
so, summoned him to appear before the As- 
sembly of the Tribes and he was sent into 
exile. When a band of Sabines, led by Ro- 
man exiles, a little later surprised the city, 
many believed that the young Kseso was one 
of the instigators. It. was soon after this 
that the Romans were defeated in a battle 
with the Yolscians and Equians, and their 
consul made a prisoner. The great Cincin- 
natus, father of Kseso, was appointed dicta- 
tor, swiftly defeated the Volscians, made 
them " pass under the yoke," released the 
consul, and then came back to make the 
tribunes feel the weight of his displeasure. 
No agrarian law, he declared, should go into 
effect while he had power to prevent it. And 
probably no act in his dictatorship pleased 
him more than inflicting condign punishment 
upon the accusers of his son Kseso. 

We strongly suspect that the old hero, 
when his triumphs were over, retired to his 
farm on the Campagna, not because he so 
loved democratic simplicity, as that he so 
hated a rising democratic ascendancy, which 
was dragging Rome down from her once high 
estate ! They were degenerate days indeed 



HISTORY OF ROME; 41 

when low-born plebeians bad power to ar- 
raign and punish patricians ! And we can 
imagine the tears of honest shame and hu- 
miliation shed by the grand old aristocrat, 
whom we revere to-day as the supreme type 
of the democratic citizen. 



CHAPTER VI. 

There was one powerful weapon held by 
the commons which no ingenuity of the pa- 
tricians could take away from them. They 
could refuse to serve as soldiers; and this 
they were doing with increasing frequency ; 
and when they did fight the spirit which had 
once made the legions invincible had de- 
parted. It was during the consulship of 
Kseso Fabius that one of these crises arrived. 
The army, supported by the tribunes, refused 
to fight. The Fabian gens was one of the 
proudest among the patricians. They had 
led in the opposition to the agrarian law of 
Spurius Cassius. and also in his condemna- 
tion. It is not probable that the personal 
feelings of Fabius had changed, or that he 
felt any less bitterly than Coriolanus and 
Cincinnatus about the elevation of the com- 
mons. But he had the political wisdom to see 
the injury done to the state by withholding 
justice from the people whose services were 



HISTORY OF ROME. 



43 



indispensable to it. He suddenly changed 
his whole attitude, and threw the great 
weight of his name and influence into the 
advocacy of the cause he had tried to defeat. 
He insisted that the agrarian law should at 
once become operative ; and when his ar- 
guments were treated with scorn by the pa- 
tricians, the entire Fabian gens, numbering 
over three hundred, with their clients and 
their slaves, and a few patrician families who 
wished to share their fortunes, marched sol- 
emnly out of the city gates. Then, as if to 
emphasize the nobility of their purpose, they 
made a fortified camp on the borders of 
Etruria for the protection of Rome ; and 
after doing the state good service for one year, 
were surprised during a religious festival by 
a band of Yeintines and slaughtered to a 
man. The plebeians had lost their most 
powerful friends. The law of debt was un- 
changed. The enormous rate of interest had 
been reduced, but the savage penalties were 
the same. Soldiers returning from long cam- 
paigns and finding their children crying for 
bread would make loans from the rich and 
then become their slaves. The tribunes were 
unceasing in trying to obtain redress for 
special cases of oppression, but the main 



44 HISTORY OF EO^IE. 

struggle of each tribunate was for their agra- 
rian rights, encouraging the people to refuse 
to respond to the levies for troops until jus- 
tice was done. At a time of extreme pressure 
the patrician lords made a concession ; they 
granted the plebeians the Aventine Hill for 
their own possession (under the Icilian Law, 
which had long been urged). The land being 
insufficient to give one plot to each, several' 
persons received one allotment, who jointly 
built their house, each story being occupied 
by a family. Such a residence being called 
insulce, while domus is the term for the man- 
sion occupied by a single family. But such 
concession gave only temporary relief and the 
relations of the orders were becoming more 
and more embittered. Appius Claudius, when 
his soldiers at a critical time refused to take 
the field against the Volscians, sternly com- 
manded that every tenth man in his legions be 
put to death ; and it was done. Then, when 
his consulship expired the proud Appius was 
summoned to appear before the tribunes, and 
realizing the humiliation and condemnation 
which awaited him he committed suicide. 

It was a time full of peril for Rome. One 
tribune had been assassinated and also many 
leading plebeians, and there is a fearful story 



HISTOEY OF ROME. 45 

of eight tribunes being burned alive. Vio- 
lence had taken the place of law, and unless 
the moderate spirits in both orders could 
check the rising tide of passion, civil war 
was inevitable. A truce was declared while 
some compromise could be considered. It 
was finally agreed that the existing troubles 
arose from the indefiniteness of the laws con- 
trolling the relations of the two orders. It 
was also agreed that a commission of ten 
should be appointed to draw up a legal code 
by which equal justice should be dealt out 
to the entire Roman people — patricians and 
plebeians alike. It was especially intend- 
ed that this code should accurately deter- 
mine the limits of authority to be exercised 
by magistrates, and the modes of redress 
and procedure in the protection of lives and 
property (the Terentillian Law). During 
these labors the patricians and the plebeians 
were to give up their consuls and their trib- 
unes, and be entirely subject to the Council 
of Ten — which was to be chosen from both 
orders, and to be called "The Decern virate" 
(450 B.C.). 

Chief among these decemvirs was Appius 
Claudius, son of the consul of that name 
who executed every tenth man in his legion. 



46 HISTORY OF ROME. 

The Code of Laws which was the work of the 
first decemvirate is known as the " Twelve 
Tables," and it is now the basis of the legal 
systems of a large part of Europe, and of 
America. It was in the second decemvirate 
that the mask was thrown aside. Appius 
had made himself so popular that he was 
re-elected, and Rome soon found herself in 
the hands of a despot, with nine imitators 
ready to do his bidding. It was said that 
instead of one Tarquin, she now had ten. 
She seemed under a spell which she knew 
not how to break ; and many citizens fled 
and joined the colonists outside. 

There was living on the Aventine a wealthy 
plebeian named Virginius, a centurion. His 
daughter Virginia, as beautiful as the day, 
was betrothed to Icilius, a former tribune. 
Appius one morning chanced to see the 
young maiden on her way to school, fle 
quickty ordered Claudius, one of his clients, 
to seize her and claim her as his slave. 
When her cries and those of her nurse 
attracted a crowd, Claudius explained that 
this girl was the child of his slave, and when 
an infant was stolen to fill the place of a 
child who had died in the house of Virginius. 
This he could prove. But he would lay his 



HISTORY OF ROME. 47 

case before the Decemvir Appius and abide 
by his decision. The next morning Virgin- 
ins and Icilius and weeping friends were at 
the Fornm when the child was brought be- 
fore the great Appius ; and when he gave 
judgment that she should remain in the 
custody of Claudius until Virginius had 
proved his right to her, they knew she was 
lost. The lictor advanced to seize her. Vir- 
ginius humbly asked if he might speak one 
word with her before she was removed. 
Then taking her in his arms and whispering 
"It is the only way, my daughter," he 
plunged a knife into her bosom. 

The whole of the Roman populace was 
aroused to a state of fury. The Senate called 
upon the decemvirs to resign. The commons 
without their tribunes were utterly defence- 
less, and knew not what fresh tyranny 
awaited them. Once more they marched to 
the Sacred Hill, there to treat with the am- 
bassadors from the Senate, or there to re- 
main, if their terms were not accepted. 

They demanded three things : That their 
tribunes be restored ; that the right of ap- 
peal from the sentence of the consuls be 
enjoyed by them as by the patricians ; and 
that the ten decemvirs be burnt alive ! 



48 HISTOBY OF ROME. 

The last savage demand was abandoned, but 
the others were accepted by the Senate. The 
first act of the new tribunate, which now 
held ten tribunes, was the impeachment of 
Appius by Virginias, the charge being a vio- 
lation of his own law, just framed in the 
Twelve Tables: "that a person claimed as 
slave, should be free until the claim was 
established." The proud patrician could 
not bear the humiliation of his downfall 
and, as his father had done not long before, 
committed suicide in prison. 

As Lucretia had destroyed the monarchy, 
so the fair Roman child Virginia had over- 
thrown the decemvirate. 

There could be no settled peace until com- 
plete equality, social and political, was ac- 
corded to the commons. Another agitation 
quickly followed. Two laws were simul- 
taneously proposed by the tribunes. The 
first of these was the Canuleian Law : legal- 
izing marriage between the two orders. "If 
we are different races of men," said they, "if 
our blood will not mingle, then let us live 
apart." It was the old threat of secession ; 
and after a storm of opposition the patricians 
yielded and the wall of caste was broken 
down. But the other demand attacked the 



HISTORY OF ROME. 49 

last stronghold of patrician Rome, and eighty 
years were to pass before it would be con- 
ceded. It was that the consulship should be 
thrown open to plebeians. To refuse might 
be dangerous. The tribunes were reminded 
of the sacred duties belonging to the office, 
and that the auspices could only be taken by 
those in whose veins coursed pure patrician 
blood. And here again was the claim of a 
difference in kind, and another reason why, 
as the commons said, they should be a sep- 
arate people. Finally, a compromise was 
reached. Instead of a consulate there should, 
during a portion of the time, be a military 
tribunate, to which both orders were alike 
eligible. This was agreed to in 444 B.C., and 
not until 400 did a single plebeian fill the of- 
fice ! It was by such empty promises as this 
that the patient plebeians were again and 
again beguiled ; a thing difficult to reconcile 
with that good faith which is the corner-stone 
of Roman character, the key-stone of their 
arch. The Roman commons were not con- 
tending with an honorable foe, but a foe which 
under great pressure, would yield the point in 
dispute, and then by legislation deprive the 
thing granted of its value, or the office con- 
ceded of the authority it had hitherto pos- 



50 HISTOEY OF ROME. 

sessed, and render the triumph void. The 
history of the long conflict is a succession 
of such tricks and evasions. Their honor and 
good faith consisted in fidelity to a code, 
not to a sense of right and justice ; and their 
code did not recognize the plebeians as 
equals, hence promises to them had no bind- 
ing power. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Roue was now mistress of all of Latium. 
The Equians and Volscians had also been 
driven back by the renewed spirit in the le- 
gions ; and there had commenced a life and 
death struggle with the great Etrurian city 
of Veii. There was an old prediction that 
Veii would fall when the Alban Lake flowed 
into the sea — which meant — never. So al- 
though the city was besieged they were not 
dismayed. Then by orders of the Roman 
Senate, a tunnel was commenced leading from 
the lake to the river Anio. For a distance of 
three miles it was cut through volcanic stone, 
making an outlet five feet high and three feet 
wide ; and the waters of the Alban Lake were 
soon flowing to the sea, and are doing so still ! 
At the same time the great Camillus was 
digging a mine which terminated under the 
sanctuary in the citadel of the doomed city ; 
and when armed Roman soldiers rose from 
the floor the prediction was fulfilled and 



52 HISTORY OF ROME. 

Veii, like ancient Troy, had fallen. The city- 
was thrown open to Roman colonists to the 
great relief of the plebeian quarter, and to 
the Veintines were assigned homes on the 
Cselian hill. 

A new and unprecedented storm was about 
to break upon the Eternal City. The Gauls, 
those barbarians of Western Europe, who 
had long been troubling Etruria, were in- 
vesting Clusium. That city appealed to 
Rome for help, and in response three envoys 
from the Senate met Brennus, the barbarian 
leader, and announced to him that Clusium 
was under Roman protection. But, they did 
something more than negotiate ; they fought 
and rendered efficient service to their Etrus- 
can friends in a battle which was in prog- 
ress. Brennus was not so much of a barba- 
rian that he did not understand his rights. 
He declared that the law of nations had been 
violated, and he should take immediate ven- 
geance upon Rome. When the Romans 
learned that the Gauls were almost at their 
gates, there was a panic. They fled by thou- 
sands to Veii and other neighboring cities. 
Eighty venerable senators and a small force 
upon the rocky pinnacle of the capital alone 
remained. The Gauls, through open gates, 



HISTORY OF ROME. 53 

entered a silent city, and when they reached 
the Forum they were awe-stricken. There 
sat eighty senators in their ivory chairs, ven- 
erable, silent, immovable. They believed a 
company of gods had come down from 
Heaven. But when one old man fiercely re- 
sented a touch upon his beard by a blow with 
his ivory staff, the spell was broken ; he was 
slain, and then the rest were quickly dis- 
patched. While the city was burning, and 
for months afterward, the Capitol on its 
rocky eminence was held by Manlius and his 
little band ; every attempt to scale the slip- 
pery height being defeated ; until that fa- 
mous dawn when the geese gave warning that 
the enemy was coming ; and the defenders 
had just time to hurl down those in advance 
who carried the rest with them. And so for 
seven months the Gauls rioted and waited, 
until at last, sated and demoralized, and with 
news of the invasion of their own homes in 
the North, they withdrew. 

Rome was only a blackened ruin. With 
difficulty were the people dissuaded from 
abandoning it, and making Yeii their city. 
But at last all had returned and were striv- 
ing to rebuild and efface the ravages of the 
destroying host. Again were the plebeians 



54 HISTORY OF BOME. 

plunged in hopeless debt to the superior or- 
der ; and again were all the rigors of the law 
of debt carried out without mercy. Manlius, 
upon seeing some of his bravest soldiers, the 
defenders of the Capitol, dragged to prison, 
himself paid their debts. So frequently did 
he do this, and so bitterly did he reproach 
the patricians, that in exasperation they ac- 
cused him of seeking popularity with ambi- 
tious designs. It was declared that his gen- 
erosity was only a part of a treasonable plot 
to make himself king. He was tried, con- 
demned, and thrown off the Tarpeian rock — 
the rock which his valor had held for seven 
months, the one spot in Rome he had kept 
untouched by barbarian feet. 

The old conflict between the orders was 
reaching its final stage. Three laws were 
proposed by the Tribune Licinius : one miti- 
gating the law of debt ; another restricting 
the amount of land to be used by any indi- 
vidual ; and the third that henceforth there 
be, not military tribunes, but two consuls ; 
one of whom should always be a plebeian. 
These are known as the "Licinian Roga- 
tions." 

It was the iron will and the inflexible pur- 
pose of two tribunes, Caius Licinius and 



HISTORY OF ROME. 55 

Lucius Sextius, which accomplished the 
seemingly impossible task of compelling the 
patricians to yield to these demands. For ten 
years they labored, being reappointed nine 
times, and during all of the last five years 
using their right of veto to stop the wheels 
of government ; not permitting a single levy 
for the army, nor the election of a single 
magistrate, consul, military tribune, ques- 
tor, or censor. The Senate in despair called 
Camillus to the dictatorship. But when 
that wise old warrior saw the invincible spirit 
of the tribunes, he advised honorable capitu- 
lation. The patricians yielded. The long 
struggle was ended ; and in 367 B.C., the first 
plebeian consul, Lucius Sextius, took his 
place in the curule chair. Camillus vowed 
a temple to Concord in commemoration of the 
great event. He had won his laurel wreath 
at the capture of Veii. But as he who rules 
his spirit is greater than he who takes a city, 
so the brave Roman's chief title to glory is 
as " Camillus the Peace-Maker." 

There was the usual attempt to impover- 
ish the office by assigning its judicial func- 
tions to a pnetor, an office then created for 
that purpose. But this was only delaying 
the inevitable ; for in 351 B.C. the censorship 



56 HISTORY OF ROME. 

was open to the commons ; in 337 the prse- 
torship was obtained ; and in 300, plebeians 
filled the priestly offices of pontifex and 
augur, and by the year 172 B.C. the patric- 
ian families had so decreased that both con- 
sulships were held by plebeians. Political 
power had not been the aim, but by slow 
and painful steps it had been attained. 
With surprising moderation there had never 
been a single demand except for relief from 
specific grievances, touching persons and 
property. The way had been long, and on 
its chief mile-stones we find inscribed: 
Tribuneship, 493. — Agrarian Law, 486. — 
Terentillian Law (the new code), 454. — Canu- 
leian Law (legalizing intermarriage), 454. — 
PublilianLaw (freeing elections from power 
of the curiae), 340. — Licinian Law (admis- 
sion of plebs to the consulate), 367, followed 
by gradual opening of all the curule and 
sacred offices, and the union of the assem- 
blies of the curiae and the tribes, by the 
year 300 B.C. 

The equalization of her commons and pa- 
tricians is the central nerve in the history of 
the Republic. Her far-reaching conquests 
were a magnificent display of power. But 
it was the core of character created in the 



HISTORY OF EOME. 57 

long internal struggle, which made that 
power possible, and which was the source of 
the enduring mastery of the empire, even 
after that character had long departed. 
Neither order could have made Rome. Each 
needed the other. The commons lacked the 
dignity and sense of mastery which comes 
from long-established supremacy ; and the 
patricians, debauched by the use and abuse 
of supreme power, must have perished with- 
out the infusion of fresh uncorrupted strength 
— the strength which comes from suffering 
patiently borne in a long, brave battle with 
oppression. This had been for the commons 
a political education and a training in the 
principles of justice. With strength no 
longer wasted at home, and with legions 
fighting as they had never fought before, an 
age of conquest began. There were some de- 
feats (a colossal and bitter one at Caudium, 
321), but more victories, and, one by one, 
rival and hostile cities were being gathered 
into Eoman dominion. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

These were obscure events in those Stirling 
times. The healing of a family quarrel at 
Rome was not discussed by the gay young 
revellers at Syracuse and Tarentum. There 
were great actors on the stage then, and mo- 
mentous issues. The everlasting drama was 
being played. There were great powers, and 
lesser powers, and crumbling cities and na- 
tions that were no powers at all : and there 
was greed — greed for territory, and for mas- 
tery ; and suspicion and fear, and craft, and 
cunning, all — all were there, while the struggle 
was going on for the grand prize, that dream of 
every ambitious nation — universal dominion. 
Sometimes Carthage and sometimes Greece 
was in the lead for this mastery in the Med- 
iterranean world. Etruria, once powerful 
on the great stage, had lapsed into obscurity. 
Phoenicia, in utter decadence, was making 
futile attempts at self-preservation ; Egypt, 
Persia, and even Assyria and Chaldea. in 
their own decrepitude, making her last days 



HISTORY OF ROME. 59 

miserable. Greece and Carthage, in the plen- 
itude of their strength, were the two gladia- 
tors. Mntnally antagonistic, one stood for the 
supreme type of civilization, the other for the 
incarnation of the spirit of trade without one 
humanizing trait ; the wicked child of an 
even more wicked Asiatic mother. No greater 
misfortune could come to the world than for 
Carthage to obtain the mastery ; and that 
was what many times seemed imminent, as 
she battered away at the beautiful old Greek 
cities which studded the shores of Southern 
Italy and of Sicily. It was these incessant 
conflicts, and the fatal rivalries among them- 
selves which had reduced the splendid con- 
stellation of Greek colonies to a few flicker- 
ing stars, Sybaris, Psestum, Cumse, already 
in ruins. Wherever Greek civilization came, 
there came also the life-giving principle ; and 
where the cruel grasp of Carthage fastened, 
there was arrested life and hopeless sodden 
barbarism ; as illustrated by Sicily, the most 
brilliant spot in the pre-Roman world, and 
Sardinia and Corsica her Carthaginian sis- 
ters, the drudges and slaves of a cruel mistress. 
Such were the conditions, and such the act- 
ors in the pre-Roman drama ; and when one 
of those periodical storms swept over the 



60 HISTOPwT OF BOMB. 

Mediterranean, the feeble clutched tighter 
their precarious kingdoms, and the Kussias 
and the Engiands watched eagerly to see how 
they might emerge from the chaos, richer and 
greater than before ; the feeble watching how 
they too might pick up a few crumbs where- 
with to renew their failing strength. 

But Greece, with a fatal political system, 
wise in all wisdom except political wisdom, 
could never have attained universal domin- 
ion. Joined to her tremendous power of will, 
Rome had an instinct for organization. Xow, 
with her fresh accession of military strength, 
with a perfect and willing instrument at hand 
to carry out the mandates of her imperious 
will, and with a renewed and consolidated 
organism to embody her administrative geni- 
us, the City of the Seven Hills was uncon- 
sciously moving toward that universal mas- 
tery of which she had never dreamed. The 
mastery even over her own peninsula was 
unpremeditated ; like England in India, each 
advance made to protect those already made, 
and for the preservation of the whole. So 
not by her own seeking she was approaching 
the frontiers of the great arena. 

In the study of history nothing is more 
obvious than the unconsciousness with which 



HISTORY OF EOME. 61 

men and nations and empires, intent only 
upon their own selfish purposes, are develop- 
ing vast designs of which they have never 
thought. Rome's advent upon the great 
stage was at the right moment. It would 
have been futile before the recent crisis in 
her internal life ; and for the nascent Roman 
power to have been overthrown by Carthage 
or by Alexander, as it might have been had 
he lived, would have removed the founda- 
tions of civilization as it exists to-day. So 
persistently does this thread of divine pur- 
pose run through history, ancient and mod- 
ern, working out the predetermined plan, 
the inference becomes irresistible that the 
overturnings of nations for selfish and tem- 
porary ends are only stitches in a design so 
vast it must be seen through the perspective 
of years, or of centuries. 

Aided by the Gauls, all of Italy was finally 
aroused to a combined effort at self-preser- 
vation. It was a terrible school for the le- 
gions, they were being welded into men of 
steel. Nothing could stand before them. One 
by one the Northern nations succumbed, and 
when the powerful Samnites in the South 
were vanquished, all of Italy had become 
Roman (272 B.C.). 



62 HISTORY OF ROME. 

But if the Roman legions had vanquished 
the Italian States, it was the administrative 
genius of Rome which retained them in her 
tenacious grasp. By converting Volscians, 
Etruscans, Samnites, at once into Romans — 
by establishing in the conquered provinces 
a vital and intimate relation with Rome, and 
Rome alone — by entangling them in the 
meshes of an ingeniously woven net of sov- 
ereignty from which they could not escape — 
once hers, she made them hers forever. The 
difference between Greek and Roman coloni- 
zation was characteristic. The Greek col- 
ony became an independent organism ; the 
Roman, only an extension of the metropolis. 
Each city was only a smaller Rome, with 
its patricians, its Senate, its two chief magis- 
trates — and a system of carefully restricted 
Roman citizenship. Perfectly unique in its 
conception, this was the nucleus of a vast em- 
pire governed by a single city. 

In weaving this magnificent system over 
the peninsula, Rome was unconscious of its 
wisdom, and that it would serve when her 
provinces extended from the British Isles to 
Chaldea. The Roman brain was a very sim- 
ple affair beside that of the Greek. It had 
no subtleties ; was not brilliant nor specula- 



HISTORY OF ROME. t»d 

tive. Their government was not the result 
of theory, but of experiment, always moving 
with a sure instinct toward that which made 
for power and permanence in institutional 
life. There was not a man in the Senate who 
could have discussed the theory of govern- 
ment with the philosophic Greeks ; but by 
intuition they had discovered what the 
Greeks would have done well to learn — the 
power of the associative principle. 

But the collective incapacity of the Greeks 
was precisely due to their transcendent indi- 
vidual greatness. It would be difficult to 
say whether the world could better have 
spared Greece or Rome. Both were building 
empires indispensable and imperishable. 

By the year 480, the invading Persian 
hosts had been driven by the Greek States 
back into Asia. Then Athens had her peer- 
less day under Pericles and her brief age of 
supremacy, to be quickly extinguished by 
the deadly conflict with envious Sparta — the 
Peloponnesian War — when Greek met Greek, 
and for thirty-seven years the peninsula was 
rent and torn, and finally, when Athens had 
surrendered, when her beauty had been de- 
faced and trampled upon by scoffing Spar- 
tans, the glory of Greece had departed. 



64 HISTORY OF ROME. 

Her interior life was gone. In 338 the en- 
feebled disorganized States found a mas- 
ter. Out of rough untutored Macedon came 
Philip, and gathered the struggling incohe- 
sive mass into his own strong keeping. In 
vain did Demosthenes utter his impassioned 
philippics. In vain did he appeal to pride 
of race and patriotism. The patriotism and 
the vigor of the Senate had been sapped. 
Greece was helpless in the grasp of the 
Macedonian. Then came Philip' s assassina- 
tion, and a brief dream of escape when his 
son Alexander, a beardless youth of only- 
twenty, succeeded him (336). But in two 
more years this boy, with the face and form 
of a god, had riveted the chains tighter than 
before, and was sweeping across into Asia to 
vanquish the Persians. This done, Tyre, 
then Gaza fell before him, and the invincible 
youth, after pausing in Egypt and founding 
his city, swept on, conquering and capturing 
from the Caspian to the Indies, planting 
Greek colonies and thickly strewing the 
seeds of Hellenic civilization by the way ; 
and after only ten years, was sitting at 
Babylon, holding his court in Oriental 
splendor, receiving embassies and the hom- 
age due to a divinity. 



HISTORY OF ROME. 65 

Among these embassies it is said there was 
one from the Samnites praying for aid in 
driving back the Romans, that hitherto 
obscure people, who were absorbing the 
Italian peninsula, and becoming a menace 
to the old Greek cities by the sea. Had this 
invincible man lived to return, the course of 
history must have been changed. His in- 
satiable ambition was already planning an 
extension of his empire westward. Italy 
and Sicily would have been swallowed up 
by the way, and Alexander not Rome would 
have performed the task of overthrowing 
the Carthaginian Empire. But this was not 
to be. In 232, Alexander succumbed to 
fever, and died at Babylon, the capital of a 
colossal empire which was destined to fall 
into pieces when his mighty hand was with- 
drawn. 

The ancient Greek city of Tarentum, here- 
tofore protected by the warlike Samnites, 
now saw herself on the borders of that new 
barbaric power with its home upon the Tiber. 
Helpless, luxurious, living upon the tradi- 
tions of former greatness, the proud city 
soon came into collision with Rome. The 
Roman Senate was weary of war. But when 
their ambassador arrived in Tarentum to ne- 



66 HISTORY OF ROME. 

gotiate a peace, the gay young Tarentines, 
who were in the midst of a wild religious 
festival, received his bad Greek with shouts 
of derisive laughter. It was an ill-timed in- 
sult. War was declared, and Tarentum ap- 
pealed to Pyrrhus, young king of Epirus, to 
undertake her defence. Full of the spirit of 
adventure, and with ambitious dreams of his 
own, Pyrrhus gladly responded, and for the 
first time the Roman legion met the Greek 
phalanx. Unused to the different mode of 
warfare, and demoralized by the elephants, 
the defeat of the Romans was inevitable. 
But Pyrrhus exclaimed, "One more such vic- 
tory, and I am undone ! " and again — " Had 
I such soldiers, the world would be mine ! " 
The Greek Cineas, whom he sent to treat 
with the Senate, returning, said : "To fight 
these people is like fighting the Hydra." 
Amazed at what he saw at Rome, he ex- 
claimed, "Their city is a temple, and their Sen- 
ate an assembly of kings ! " So, after many 
costly and barren victories, this romantic, 
chivalrous young king, who so resembles 
Charles XII. of Sweden in character and in 
career, abandoned the Italian peninsula and 
his dream of playing Alexander in the West 
(278 B.C.). 



HISTORY OF ROME. 67 

Rome was being gradually drawn toward 
the vortex of the political whirlpool in the 
south, the centre of which vortex had always 
been Sicily. Partly Carthaginian and partly 
Greek, this island had been for centuries the 
storm centre ; the brilliant city of Syracuse, 
many times laid low by its Carthaginian 
neighbor, Agrigentum, and many times ris- 
ing again from its ashes more splendid than 
before. 

It was in 264 B.C. that Rome passed the 
dividing line between obscurity and great- 
ness, and entered the great arena by way of 
an insignificant door which opened to her in 
Sicily. No less heroic, or even less reputable 
cause was ever championed, or ever ushered 
in a train of events so tremendous. A ma- 
rauding band of mercenaries from Campania, 
called Mammertines, had taken possession 
of the little town of Messana in Sicily, had 
murdered the males, and then appropriated 
their homes and wives and daughters. When 
the Syracusans attempted to dislodge this 
community of pirates, the Mammertines ap- 
pealed to Rome for protection. The Senate 
was not in favor of espousing such a cause. 
It was a disreputable one, and would also be 
a challenge to either Greeks or Carthaginians. 



68 HISTORY OF BOMB. 

But the Roman people had acquired an insa- 
tiate appetite for military conquests, and the 
protection asked for was voted by the popular 
assembly. Thus was commenced that series 
of wars which were to extend over a period 
of 118 years ; and as the Phoenician language 
spoken by the Carthaginians was called by 
the Romans Punic, these are known as the 
Punic Wars. 

Carthage, with her wealth and her power 
was a prodigious engine of cruelty. She 
ruled her colonies with excessive rigor, im- 
posing tribute that it required all their 
industry to pay. The government was an 
oligarchy. A few aristocratic families de- 
scended from Tyrian kings held the power of 
the state, which was chiefly vested in a coun- 
cil of one hundred, elected by themselves 
for life. The military generals, selected not 
because of fitness, but on account of personal 
relations with the heads of the oligarchy, if 
unsuccessful, were beheaded or crucified by 
their aristocratic friends. As this latter was 
their favorite mode of punishment, it seems 
not improbable that crucifixion came into 
Rome by way of Carthage. With such a 
nation Rome had embarked upon a struggle 
which would survive four generations of men. 



HISTORY OF ROME. 69 

Herself a novice upon the sea, she had chal- 
lenged the greatest maritime power then ex- 
isting. It was an untried path, which only a 
strange indwelling consciousness of power 
could have ventured upon. There were many 
defeats. But there was somewhat in these 
Romans which made them rise stronger from 
defeat than their enemies from victory. Their 
fleet might be stranded on the African coast, 
its commander, Regulus, a prisoner. But 
the man who could bring back to his city 
offers of peace from his captors — advise that 
they be not accepted — and then return to 
certain death by torture, reveals a source of 
strength which cannot be measured. Whether 
true or legendary, this story explains the 
miracle of Rome's invincibility. When the 
first Punic War was finished Sicily was a Ro- 
man province; humiliating terms had been 
imposed upon Carthage. Hanno, her unfortu- 
nate general, had been crucified, and the great 
Hamilcar, with Spain as his military basis, 
was planning to recover Sicily, and Sardinia 
and Corsica which had also been ceded, his 
boy, Hannibal, in camp with him, in training 
for his own part in the struggle. 

It was when this boy succeeded to the com- 
mand in Spain that the conflict began to as- 



70 HISTORY OF ROME. 

suine its colossal dimensions. The ancient 
Greek city of Saguntum, which for centuries 
had looked out upon the sea, was in alliance 
with Rome. Her destruction was the first 
note of defiance. Hannibal then proceeded 
to realize his stupendous plan. The Romans 
had carried the war into Africa, now he 
would carry it into Italy. He would march 
through Gaul, across the Alps, there rein- 
forced by the Cis- Alpine Gauls — those tire- 
less tormentors of Rome — what matter if half 
his men perished b}^ the way ! — and on the 
plains of Italy he would be met by Hasdru- 
bal his brother, with another great Cartha- 
ginian army, and Rome would be theirs. 
This gigantic plan, as great in execution 
as in conception, met its final climax at 
Cannse (216). The Consul Fabius who, by 
long and skilfully evading a conflict, gave 
his name to that policy of delay, was replaced 
by the impetuous Varro, and the battle was 
fought — and lost. Forty thousand Romans 
were lying dead upon the field, and an easy 
path seemed open to Rome. Yarro was not 
crucified, but commended by the undaunted 
Roman Senate for his faith in the Republic, 
while with lofty courage it levied boys, slaves, 
anyone who could carry arms, to fill up the 



HISTORY OF EOME. 71 

fresli legions. In this hour of Carthaginian 
ascendancy, while the fate of the Republic 
was trembling in the balance, the lifeless 
Greek States, like drift-wood, were swept into 
the swiftest current. Macedonia made alli- 
ance with Hannibal. This sealed the fate of 
Greece. The invading army of Hannibal was 
soon acting on the defensive. The great 
Scipio had driven the last Carthaginian out of 
Spain, and was in Africa. By the year 183 
B.C. Hannibal was a fugitive and a suicide. 
In 171 the king of Macedonia was adorning 
a triumphal procession in the streets of Rome 
— and by the year 146 every Greek state had 
been subjugated. Carthage, as a city or even 
as a name, no longer existed, but was known 
as the Roman province of Africa. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Rome, the heart and centre of this great 
expansion, so wise in all that made for con- 
quest and power and authority, failed to rec- 
ognize that simple truth which great nations 
to-day are so slow to learn — that in order to 
be really sound, a nation must be sound in 
all its parts ; that for its common people to 
be in abject misery while a favored class is 
enjoying the fruits of its increased prosper- 
ity, is to bear the seeds of dissolution within 
itself. Every year the gulf had been grow- 
ing wider between the two classes — no longer 
patrician and plebeian — but the aristocratic 
class and the people. As the thirst for 
wealth and political ascendancy grew in the 
one. the sense of injustice deepened in the 
other. Appius Claudius, he who built the 
Appian Way and who was consul during 
the war with Pyrrhus. cunningly strove to 
offset the majorities of the common pe ] " 
by bestowing the fn ise upon the freed- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 73 

men, the children of emancipated slaves, who 
were the natural adherents of his order ; at 
the same time striving to win the support of 
the commons by bringing to the thirsty Av- 
entine the first great aqueduct. But much 
as they needed water, the dwellers outside 
the sacred city limits (the Ager Romanus) 
needed land more ; and the entire disregard 
of the Licinian Law, restricting the amount 
of public domain to be used by one person, 
was engendering destructive forces which 
threatened more disaster to the Republic 
than had Carthaginians or Macedonians. The 
vast wealth which poured into Rome after 
the conquest of these nations passed into the 
hands of a few, and these few, by still fur- 
ther extending the franchise to strangers, 
also continued to keep in their own hands 
the administration of the affairs of the Re- 
public. They alone were reaping the benefit 
from the enormous sacrifices borne alike by 
all for generations. Thousands of Roman 
citizens, men who were soldiers and patriots, 
had become beggars and vagrants, and the 
wise, even among the nobles, realized that 
the Republic was falling into an abyss from 
which they might be powerless to extricate 
it. A crisis was inevitable. It came in 133, 



74 HISTORY OF ROME. 

when the Tribune Tiberius Sempronius Grac- 
chus attempted to re-enact the Licinian Law. 
In the riots which ensued, Gracchus, with 
many of his followers, was slain, and the work 
of reform was taken up by his younger 
brother, Caius Sempronius Gracchus. The 
destructive forces underlying the whole so- 
cial condition had begun to escape, and a 
revolution had commenced which was to ter- 
minate only with the Republic, and with the 
advent of the great master — Julius Caesar. 

Rome had passed her splendid climacteric 
when in native simplicity and with phenom- 
enal strength she burst the bonds of her bar- 
baric chrysalis and declared herself mistress 
of the Mediterranean, and when by sheer 
force of ability and of character she compelled 
the ancient world to bow down before her, and 
to wear the yoke she herself had so skilfully 
forged. But when she became debauched 
with power and wealth, when avarice and 
greed had corrupted her heart, and when un- 
digested foreign refinements and learning had 
corrupted her morals, the descent was swift. 
If ever she had need to be strong and wise 
it was when that torrent from the Orient 
and from Greece and from Africa was sub- 
merging the Roman nation. The nobility for 



HISTORY OF ROME. 75 

which the word Roman stands belongs to 
the period of her isolation. When the Ro- 
man Senate, the greatest representative body 
that ever existed, with unexampled wisdom 
and dignity was guiding the State and keep- 
ing sacred its honor, and when noble Ro- 
mans vied with each other in sacrifices for 
the Republic. But a different quality was 
expressed by the name now, when a despic- 
able aristocracy was revelling in coarse splen- 
dor and sensuous luxury, and famishing 
multitudes were willing to exchange their 
manhood and their votes for corn and gladia- 
torial shows ; and when all alike were be- 
coming brutalized by the passion for human 
combats, which popular sentiment demanded 
must be fought to the death. Still there were 
some who realized the degradation which had 
come upon the ancient city, and as Lucullus 
stands for the lavish splendor of this age, so 
Cato no doubt represents the sentiment of 
many in clinging to the austere simplicity of 
the Republic in its best days. 

Imbedded in the mass of avarice and crime 
and cruelty and of unassimilated foreign ele- 
ments, we find the Jugurthine War. Called 
to defend the people of Numidia from Ju- 
gurtha, a criminal usurper, the Roman lead- 



76 HISTORY OF ROME. 

ers, corrupted by bribes, were conniving at 
his crimes. ISTo such disgrace had ever come 
upon Roman arms. Metellus, who did what 
he could to efface the stain, brought Jugur- 
tha to Home, where he perished, it is said, by 
starvation. But out of this Jugur thine in. 
famy came Marius, the great leader of the 
popular party. Humble in origin, and with 
an ability which matched his ambition, he 
succeeded Metellus in the command of the 
army in the East ; then, burning with hatred 
of the aristocratic party, he organized the 
revolutionary forces and led them against 
the party of oppression under Sulla in a civil 
war, a war in which rivers of blood flowed 
in vain, and in which the Republic virtually 
perished. When the victorious Sulla in 82 
was proclaimed dictator for an indefinite 
period, the Republic was dead. 

The machinery of government might go on 
from the old momentum and wars be fought, 
but the life of the organism was extinct ; and 
the mass of heterogeneous elements was wait- 
ing to become the prey of the ablest among 
the men to be seen about the Forum. Would 
this be Pompey, the successful general who 
brought to a close the war with Mithridates, 
King of Pontus, and then distributed thrones 



HISTORY OF ROME. 77 

in Syria, as if already a king, wearing the 
while such a pleasant cloak of humility ? It 
was a game in politics the most desperate the 
world ever saw, and the most tremendous in 
results ; a game in which every player wore 
a mask, and with consummate art was seek- 
ing the thing he pretended not to want. The 
prizes wore the grand old names, consul, 
quaestor, prsetor, censor, pontifex maximus ; 
but these were only points of vantage by 
which to seize the real thing — the reins of 
power in the perishing Republic. Foremost 
in this group at the Forum are Pompey, 
Crassus, Cicero, Catiline, Clodius and Csesar. 
Pompey was far in advance of the others, un- 
til Cicero, by unmasking and defeating Cati- 
line's deep-laid conspiracy, proclaimed him- 
self the saviour of his country. The plan of 
that young patrician profligate was to extri- 
cate himself from a load of debt by setting 
fire to the city of Rome, overthrowing the 
Constitution, and then, in the general confu- 
sion, seizing the reins of government. A large 
number of reckless young aristocrats were 
drawn by him into the plot, which was un- 
masked by Cicero. But if this made the 
great orator popular with the people, it had 
a contrary effect with a great part of the pa- 



78 HISTORY OF ROME. 

tricians, more or less involved in the in- 
famy. 

Yet the men engaged in the game for pow- 
er did not know that they were playing with 
a master, a man supremely great in everything 
he undertook. Not more pure than they 
in his motives, not more scrupulous in his 
methods, Caius Julius Csesar was yet the one 
man living who had the ability to lift Rome 
out of the abyss into which she had fallen. 

Never was the golden thread of divine 
purpose more obvious than in placing this 
prodigy among men at that gateway between 
the past and the future ; behind him the ages 
of conflict with the powers of darkness, be- 
fore him the kingdom of the Prince of Peace 
and of love and of light ! Since the founding 
of Rome the trend had been steadily toward 
this climax. Rome could not perish, for her 
work had only just commenced — a work for 
which the ages behind her had been merely 
a preparation ; this was, to gather up and to 
conserve the priceless riches of Greek culture 
and thought, and then to receive and to hold 
that other life-creating stream which was 
about to come into the world. Greek civili- 
zation and Christianity were the mind and 
soul of the coming race of man ; and these, 



HISTOKY OF ROME. 79 

it was the appointed task of Rome to hold as 
in a reservoir, and then to open up channels 
for their distribution to the nations of the 
earth. Caesar' s was the mighty hand chosen 
to convert the perishing Roman Republic 
into a suitable instrument for this task, to 
gather up its latent energies stored in the 
days of the old republic, to consolidate and 
to reconstruct all of its inchoate elements 
into an empire. It would need force of an 
appalling nature to accomplish what this 
empire would have to do. In that pre- 
Christian world love was not an active force. 
The empire was to be cruel, pitiless, awe-in- 
spiring, adamantine and impregnable, for it 
must endure for four centuries, and would 
have need of all its vast riches and resources 
in order to accomplish its appointed task. 
But it would be done, and the five short 
years of Caesar's sovereignty would contain 
the germs of a future Europe, and of the 
world's development as it exists to-day. 

But at the time we have reached, Caesar 
was only one of many aspirants for leader- 
ship. He was a patrician among patricians, 
for did he not belong to the great Julian 
gens, descended from gods and kings ! But 
what he kept most prominently before the 



80 HISTORY OF ROME. 

people was his connection with the rough 
soldier Marius ; their adored leader, whose 
nephew he was by marriage, but whose name 
must not be whispered now, in this age of aris- 
tocratic supremacy. So, by fearlessly, auda- 
ciously, associating himself with the popular 
cause, by skilfully ingratiating himself al- 
ways with the people, he rose step by step 
until he was consul ; the very first act being 
the passing of an agrarian law which be- 
stowed vast tracts of public lands in Cam- 
pania and other provinces, thus relieving the 
congested misery which was seven stories 
deep in the insulce upon the Aventine. Then 
followed his amazing military successes 
until the final conquest of Gaul. Pompey 
saw his own victories in the east eclipsed by 
those of Csesar in the west, and his long as- 
cendency slipping into the hands of his rival. 
There was only one thing to be done : that 
was to disarm him. Not long before this, 
Pompey and Csesar and Crassus had formed a 
friendly alliance (" the first Triumvirate ") to 
curb a growing oligarchy in the Senate. But 
in the swiftly changing scene, Pompey was 
now in high favor and in close alliance with 
this senatorial power, and at his instigation 
the order was given for Caesar to disband his 



HISTORY OF ROME. 81 

army ; Cato standing ready the moment he 
arrived in Rome to accuse him, and to bring 
about his impeachment. All was prepared 
for his downfall. 

In the old time a tribune's veto would have 
arrested such a proceeding ; but when the 
tribune Mark Antony, friend and adherent 
of Csesar, issued his veto, he had to flee from 
the wrath of the aristocratic party and take 
refuge in the camp of Csesar ; and there the 
order from the Senate was received. This 
was the crucial moment. Should he obey, 
divest himself of all official authority, and 
" naked to his enemies," return to Rome a 
private citizen % Or should he refuse to obey, 
cross the Rubicon with the G-allic legions he 
had taught to conquer or to die, and defy 
Pompey and his Senatorial legions, not yet 
created % He took the chances on this des- 
perate resolve ; crossed the Rubicon, pursued 
the Pompeian forces through Gaul and Spain, 
and into the East, until their final overthrow 
at Pharsalia in Greece, and the tragic death 
of Pompey, which ended the Civil War. 
Other triumphs quickly followed, a defeat 
of the Egyptian army at Alexandria, whither 
he had gone, at the solicitation of Cleopatra, 
to act as mediator in a dispute with her 



82 HI5T0BY OF EOME. 

brorlier Ptolemy. Another in Pontus. where 
the son of Mithridates was leading a revolt, 
and whence came the historic dispatch — 
''' Yeni, Yldi, Yici,'- and still another in Af- 
rica. All of Eome was now ready to pros- 
trate itself at the feet of the conqueror ; and 
the streets of that city had never beheld any- 
thing like the trinmph awarded him. Gauls. 
Egyptians. Asiatics, Africans in chains, rep- 
resented the list of his conquests : the most 
significant of all. that of Poinpey. conspic- 
uous in its absence ! A frantic joy took pos- 
session of the whole people. The Senate, ab- 
ject in flattery, named after him the month 
in which he was born — Julius — or July. 
They laid at his feet every power, every title. 
and dictatorship for life. He asked only to 
be consul ; but while wearing this modest title 
he was in fact sovereign of a Roman Empire 
and of the world. The adulation of a god he 
received as if it were only his due. but as if it 
wearied him. Vast plans of reconstruction 
filled his mind ; the Empire no longer to be 
ruled by a single city — Eome. its capital, 
not mistress. He was awakening dead pa- 
triotism, and opening channels by which it 
might give life and warmth to the remotest 
parts of the organism ; reforming the calen- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 83 

dar; adapting the ancient code of laws to 
new conditions. A man of the future, he 
was standing amid the wreck of the tradi- 
tions of the past, and the world will never 
cease to wonder what might have been the 
outcome, had a complete system, bearing the 
stamp of his genius, been allowed to mature. 
Fragmentary and incomplete as it was, it 
changed the whole direction of human events. 
But a revulsion of feeling was setting in. 
This clemency to the people was suspicious, 
and this opening of the franchise to his 
Gauls, and the Senate to foreign people, 
seemed all a part of some gigantic plan of 
enslavement. To be adored by the people 
had always been reason enough for the de- 
struction of a leader. A few jealous senators 
and a small number of men influenced, some 
by personal spite, and some by the madness 
which makes of tyrannicide a sacred duty, 
formed a plan for his assassination. Brutus, 
"Caesar's angel," as Shakespeare calls him, 
was reminded that his great progenitor de- 
livered them from the Tarquins, did not re- 
ceive favors from them ! Of all the blows 
which rained upon him that 15th of March, 
" when the great Caesar fell" at the foot of 
Pompey's statue, it was that of Brutus which 



84 HISTORY OF ROME. 

pained him most ; for " then his great heart 
broke," and he covered his head with his 
mantle, and accepted his fate. 

They had thought to kill him, but Caesar 
dead was more powerful than Csesar living. 
Another revulsion set in. His generosity, his 
magnanimity were recalled ; and when Mark 
Antony in his funeral oration, recited his 
gifts to the people, and showed the wounds 
inflicted by the "envious Casca," and by 
Cassius, it was received with a passion of 
grief; and when he read Caesar's will, be- 
queathing rich provinces to his murderers, 
one to Cassius, another to Casca, and to 
Brutus Cis- Alpine Gaul and the guardian- 
ship of his nephew and heir, Octavius, then 
the people were wrought to such a state of 
fury that the assassins had to flee from the 
city. 



CHAPTER X. 

Rome was now without a master. Out of 
the chaos there came a Second Triumvirate, 
composed of Octavius, Antony, and Lepi- 
dus, who divided the world between them ; 
Antony the East, Octavius the West, and 
Lepidus Africa. The enemy of one, was to 
be the enemy of all. So Cicero, who had 
been striving by his philippics to destroy 
Antony, was among the multitude of the 
proscribed, and was slain in his garden. 
Brutus and Cassius, pursued by Antony, 
perished at Philippi, and met their victim 
and their Judge. 

But it was in Egypt that Antony had met 
his fate, when he became ensnared by that 
Circe of the Nile, Cleopatra. So infatuated did 
the once great tribune and general become, 
that he divorced his wife, the sister of Octa- 
vius ; and when the Senate learned that the 
great Triumvir was bestowing Roman terri- 
tory upon the children of Cleopatra, he was 



86 HISTORY OF EOME. 

deprived of his powers, and Octavius sailed 
for the East with a fleet. The defeat at 
Actium (31 B.C.) made of Egypt a Roman 
province, and was quickly followed by the 
suicide of the disgraced Antony ; and then 
by that of Cleopatra, who rather than en- 
dure the fate of adorning the triumph of 
Octavius at Rome, destroyed herself. The 
Senate bestowed upon Octavius the name 
Augustus — the Illustrious, and the month in 
which he had won Egypt was called after 
him — August. The other triumvir, Lepidus, 
was soon effaced, and Augustus Caesar was 
undisputed master of the world. 

Politics no longer offered a field for am- 
bitious Romans, and their immense activi- 
ties flowed into a new channel. Since the 
Macedonian conquests had flooded Rome 
with Greek scholars, Hellenic learning and 
ideals had become a passion. Sitting at the 
feet of their slaves, men like Cicero had be- 
come not alone learned, but deeply imbued 
with Greek culture, and there had com- 
menced a splendid imitation of Athenian 
thought. Without the creative genius of 
their great models, a literature came into be- 
ing which makes the Augustan Age second 
only to that of Pericles. In the pause be- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 87 

tween the old and the new, in the tranquil 
interval between the passing of the Roman 
Republic and the coming of that supreme 
factor, Christianity, are found the names 
Lucretius, Yirgil, Horace, Ovid, Strabo, to be 
soon followed by Pliny, Seneca, Plutarch, 
and Juvenal. The name of Caesar heads this 
illustrious group. Great in authorship as in 
all else, Caesar's Commentaries place him 
among the fathers of Roman literature in 
the pre- Augustan age. 

This golden age in literature was a time 
of gilded splendor in all things. There was 
luxury, sensuous, gross, and barbaric in ex- 
cess ; enough to have made the austere Cato 
clothe himself in sackcloth if he had not 
already committed suicide over the fall of 
Pompey and of the republic. But the ex- 
panding thought and the triumphs in litera- 
ture had given a deeper meaning and a richer 
coloring to life ; and the distempers which 
attend imperialism had not yet developed. 
Their Caesar had not abused the opportunity 
created for him by the great Caesar, and 
Rome, content and triumphant, was the blaz- 
ing centre of the world. 

At this moment, in the small Roman prov- 
ince of Judea, and in Bethlehem, the most 



88 HISTORY OF ROME. 

obscure town in Jndea, there was born a 
child. There was no room for his mother at 
the inn, so the stable was his birthplace, and 
the manger his cradle. It would be thirty 
years before Rome would hear of this child 
Jesus, and then only as a harmless fanatic 
who had made himself offensive to the Jews. 
But in three centuries more, the waning Ro- 
man Empire would be trying to reinforce her 
strength and hide her decrepitude beneath 
his great mantle, and would acknowledge 
him King of Kings. And the glory of Rome 
would forever after be that it was the throne 
of his empire. 

As the reign of Augustus was drawing to 
its close, and while he was weeping for his 
lost legions, lured by Hermann into the 
depths of the German forest and slain, — at 
this very time the boy Christ was in the 
temple at Jerusalem confounding the wisdom 
of the wise, while "his mother sought him 
sorrowing." 

The period between Augustus and Vespa- 
sian, which reached its climax in Nero, is one 
of unmitigated and revolting atrocities. Men 
hitherto gentle and human in their impulses 
seem, at the touch of the imperial throne, to 
have been converted into monsters. Tibe- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 89 

rius, the admirable soldier, who succeeded 
Augustus, quickly reached this transforma- 
tion. In creating the Praetorian Guards, he 
converted the empire into a military despot- 
ism. This body of ten thousand men was 
an instrument for his own use, which at any 
moment might be employed against the peo- 
ple. The assemblies were abolished, their 
functions transferred to the Senate, which 
body was now reduced to a mere slavish in- 
strument to wreak the personal vengeance of 
the emperor ; its chief function being to try 
cases of high treason against his person. 
Spies and informers were lurking every- 
where : death without trial inevitably follow- 
ing arrest. The furies seem to have been let 
loose in the land ; a being of inconceivable 
cruelty on the throne, alternately resigning 
himself to debauchery, and to torturing fits 
of remorse ; earthquakes, conflagrations, and 
disaster abroad ; — it was in such a time of 
lurid horror that the Roman Governor Pilate, 
in the judgment hall at Jerusalem, was wash- 
ing his hands of the responsibility he was 
about to assume, saying, — "I am innocent 
of the blood of this just person — see ye to 
it." Is it strange that the earth trembled, 
and that there was terror and despair, and 



90 HISTORY OF ROME. 

that mercy and justice and hope seemed dead 
in the Roman Empire, while the Son of Man 
was being scourged and crucified ! 

Upon the death of Tiberius, the Praetorian 
Guards, the Senate, and the people united in 
calling Caligula, the excellent son of a noble 
sire, to the throne. His father was German- 
icus, the great general. For nearly a year 
he inspired confidence and hope. Then, 
seized by a sudden illness, the transforma- 
tion came ; and on his recovery, he too was 
a monster. The excesses of his cruelties and 
of his vices, and his hunger for adulation, 
offset by no ability, made him an object of 
contempt as well as horror ; and while insist- 
ing that he be worshipped as a god, he was 
cut down by his own Praetorian Guards ; 
to be followed by Claudius, not vicious, but 
a weakling. The demons passing him by, 
seem to have entered into his two wives; 
first Messalina, whose atrocious profligacy 
is an explanation, if not a justification, of 
her execution by the order of Claudius her 
husband ; who then immediately married 
the more able and no less vicious Agrippina, 
by whom he himself was assassinated in 
order to secure the throne for her son Nero ; 
she to be in turn assassinated by this very 



HISTORY OF ROME. 91 

son, when he had come well under the spell 
of madness which inevitably attended such 
elevation ! 

Nero's reign was a climax, and it fittingly 
ushered in the persecution of that obscure 
Jewish sect — the Christians, whom Tacitus 
says had rendered themselves odious "by 
their hatred of the human race ! " Rome 
was nearly destroyed by a conflagration. 
Nero was suspected of having kindled it, 
and in order to divert suspicion from 
himself, he charged it upon the Christians. 
Ingenious cruelties were devised for their 
death — it was an opportunity to amuse the 
people. They were covered with the skins 
of wild beasts and thrown into the arena, 
nailed to crosses, and at night were made 
human torches to illumine Nero's gardens. 
It was in the outburst of fury during this 
persecution that Peter and Paul are said to 
have perished in Rome. Like that of his 
predecessors, the death of Nero was a vio- 
lent one and occurred in 68 a.d. 

In viewing this horrible century after 
Julius Csesar one asks why his agency in 
human affairs should be exalted. But his 
work had been wrenched from his hand, 
fragmentary and incomplete. Csesar would 



92 HIS TOE Y OF EOME. 

never have degraded the Roman Senate and 
extinguished the voice of the people ; not 
because he was beneficent, but because he 
was wise, his genius instinct with the spirit 
of the future. But the empire, rigid and 
inexorable with the strength he had infused 
into it, had fallen into the hands of madmen, 
and was to remain a soulless engine of pow- 
er and cruelty for four centuries. 

With the reign of Vespasian better times 
came. The building of the Coliseum, and 
the fall of Jerusalem mark this period. 
Josephus, who was one of the Jewish cap- 
tives taken in Galilee, has preserved for us 
the details of the great tragedy, when the 
city, besieged by Titus, son of Vespasian, 
finally fell ; and when the people found 
their last refuge in the Temple, and perished 
with it (70 a.d.). It was during the succeed- 
ing reign of Titus that the eruption of Vesu- 
vius occurred which destroyed the old Greek 
cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum (79 a.d.). 
Roman power had now extended over Brit- 
ain and Agricola was building his wall across 
the isthmus between England and Scotland. 

Trajan's was the most humane and enlight- 
ened reign which had yet come ; a wise 
statesmanship striving to re-establish some of 



HISTORY OF ROME. 93 

the ancient freedom ; and Trajan's Column, 
erected by a grateful senate and people, 
stands to-day as his memorial. The reign of 
Marcus Aurelius, "a sage upon a throne" 
(161-180 A.D.), closed this benign period ; 
and was a climax of excellence and virtue, 
as Nero's had been one of wickedness. A 
love of learning and a passion for morality 
joined to a singularly devout nature, made 
of this man a shining exemplar of the Stoic 
philosophy which so powerfully influenced 
Roman thought and life. But although truly 
intent upon the happiness and well-being of 
all created things, the illustrious pagan did 
not rebuke the frightful Christian persecu- 
tions, which after long cessation broke out 
afresh in his empire. 



CHAPTER XL 

It is impossible to understand the mental 
attitude of educated Romans during this 
period without understanding Stoicism, that 
Greek exotic which so profoundly pene- 
trated Roman life and institutions. The 
ancient mythology had long ago become 
assimilated with that of Greece. But while 
their gods were the same, the religion had 
for the Romans an essentially different 
character. It was for them a compact of 
mutual obligations between gods and men. 
In return for certain rites and observances, 
these beings, greater than themselves, were 
to bestow benefits here, and an immunity 
from suffering hereafter. It was a cool, pas- 
sionless contract, equally binding upon both. 
Its once powerful hold had gradually weak- 
ened, and with the influx of Greek thought 
and the consequent awakening of Roman 
intelligence, augurs and auspices had be- 
come of small account, and the whole sacer- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 95 

dotal system an empty shell. But a reliance 
upon something outside of, and greater than 
ourselves, is a necessity for the human soul ; 
and the Roman mind began to search among 
the things new and strange which had 
poured into Rome — the magic, the astrol- 
ogy, the Greek philosophies, the Egyptian 
and Oriental mysteries — for something to 
satisfy this hunger. In Stoicism they found 
a philosophy precisely suited to the native 
Roman character. It was noble and it was 
heroic. It was hard, unloving, but it was 
courageous and true. It justified the 
Roman to himself, and made of his moral 
deficiencies the loftiest virtue. They had 
never known mercy, nor pity, nor any ten- 
der emotion ; so a philosophy which made 
the absence of these weaknesses its main 
tenet was congenial. Stoicism was a rigid 
ethical system under the guidance of human 
reason. It was an austere, uncompromising 
pursuit of virtue without hope of reward, 
here or hereafter. And this virtue must 
proceed from the will, not the emotions. 
Clemency was a virtue, but pity a weakness. 
Death, sickness, loss, were not evils, only 
opportunity for more virtue in despising 
their efforts to torment you. Anaxagoras 



96 HISTORY OF ROME. 

on being told of the death of his son simply 
said : " I never supposed I had begotten an 
immortal/' The fountain of benevolence, 
of tears for others' woes, would inevitably be 
dried by such a system. It was a moral 
monstrosity ; but it had within it a regenera- 
ting principle, and a profound basic truth. 
Virtue in Rome, where all existed for the 
state, meant political virtue ; and this meant 
an awakening of character, and the enormous 
power attained by Stoicism in that period 
of deepest corruption, from Cato to Marcus 
Aurelius, was a natural effort toward the 
rehabilitation of character; and is a proof of 
the inherent tendency toward moral health, 
still existing in the nation. It is the strang- 
est of anomalies to see this stream of austere 
virtue threading its way through the mass 
of loathsome licentiousness, gathering up 
volume and strength and entering into the 
structure of Roman Institutions. It is found 
to-day imbedded in Roman jurisprudence. 
The principle underlying Stoic philosophy, 
and which was its life, was that of the 
universal brotherhood of humanity, a unity 
by virtue of a law of nature, knitting men 
into one body ; and added to this a recogni- 
tion of the inherent dignity of man, which 



HISTORY OF ROME. 97 

circumstances could not impair or touch. 
These lay at the very basis of the question 
of human rights and of equity ; and Roman 
law ; as formulated by its great expounders 
in those days, in its language and in its 
spirit, bears the unmistakable impress of 
Stoicism. 

But while profoundly true in its basic prin- 
ciples Stoicism was an unnatural, passion- 
less system to live by. It was a deliberate 
attempt to eliminate the divine and the spon- 
taneous, to dry up the springs of hope and 
love and pity and of joy. It is remembered 
only as one of the diseased phases of the hu- 
man soul on its way toward peace ; and it is 
a significant fact that Greece fed upon the 
dry husks of Stoicism in the days of her in- 
tellectual decline, and Rome in the period 
of her moral decay. It was a rugged staff 
which both used as a support in times of 
desperate need and indigence, and then 
threw away. 

Understanding his philosophy, we can also 
understand why the gentle and devout Mar- 
cus Aurelius was not moved by the torturing 
of Christians at Lyons, and are not surprised 
that poets and writers who constantly lauded 
virtue and decried vice, found their recrea- 



98 HISTORY OF ROME. 

tion in witnessing the horrible sufferings in 
the arena. Nor does it appear so inconceiv- 
able that in the reign of the excellent Titus, 
three thousand gladiators perished for the 
entertainment of Rome, and in that of the 
good and beneficent Trajan — ten thousand ! 

Epicureanism, which made pleasure, not 
virtue, its end, never attained such an in- 
fluence. It was moving with the popular 
stream, so had not the power which attends 
a reaction. But both Greek Platonism and 
oriental mysticism strongly appealed to 
many minds. Platonism, which was mono- 
theistic, included a belief in a system of 
spiritual daemons or divinities which were the 
agents of the divine will. It was this belief 
which linked it with oriental mysticism, 
which claimed that there was a divine in- 
dwelling which was the all-good, and which 
could be invited into the soul by austerities 
and meditation, inducing a state of spiritual 
exaltation. So these two blended into a 
Neo-Platonism which was destined to super- 
sede Stoicism. Stoicism and Neo-Platonism 
were as wide apart as Ptolemaic and Coper- 
nican astronomy. Stoicism made man the 
active centre, Neo-Platonism made him the 
passive recipient from the divine centre. 



HISTOEY OF ROME. 99 

Stoicism made human reason the sole guide, 
Neo-Platonism discarded the teachings of 
reason, and listened for the voice of the di- 
vine indwelling ; silence and meditation its 
teachers. It was the same ancient wisdom 
as that now taught by men from the East, 
who doubtless walked the streets of Rome, 
olive-skinned, turbanned, serene in their 
orientalism, just as they do here to-day, ex- 
pounding the philosophy of existence which 
was old before Rome or iEneas or Troy 
existed. 

Far down beneath this ferment of thought, 
and this turbid mingling of Roman depravity 
and eastern subtleties, there were flowing 
unseen rivulets of truth, the simplest ever 
presented to man ; truths uttered in Galilee 
by Him who was scourged and crucified at 
Jerusalem. As Greek and Asiatic slaves 
had brought their system and taught them to 
their masters, so Judsean slaves, especially 
since the fall of Jerusalem, had brought the 
story of the life and death of their Christ, 
for whom so many had already suffered 
and died during the early days of the em- 
pire. Founded upon miraculous stories con- 
cerning a Nazarene carpenter, stories un- 
supported by evidence, is it strange that the 



100 HISTORY OF ROME. 

learned heard nothing of this " still small 
voice," and heeded not if they heard % They 
were listening for the whirlwind. But the 
gentle teachings of the new religion, its pure 
and noble system of ethics — the compassion 
and love it offered from One who was Him- 
self " a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with 
grief" and "touched with a feeling for our 
infirmities," — all this sank deep into sin-sick 
hearts. The simplicity of the message, and 
the peace it brought was winning disciples — 
disciples who would spread the glad tidings, 
and in their rapture court death and beg the 
privilege of martyrdom. This religion con- 
tained all that was best in Stoicism and in 
Neo-Platonism, but with an animating prin- 
ciple of spiritual life absent in both. Roman 
literature said not a word of it. But while the 
learned were contemptuous and incredulous 
it was creeping into households and hearts 
and silently winning disciples throughout 
the empire. Stoicism itself had been uncon- 
sciously modified by it, and was in fact ex- 
piring when Marcus Aurelius was writing 
his profoundly religious "Meditations." 
This philosopher had need of all his stoicism 
in his unhappy domestic relations, with his 
perverse and dissolute wife Faustina instigat- 



HISTORY OF ROME. 101 

ing rebellion in the east, and striving to win 
the love of Spartacus the gladiator, who was 
the idol of the hour in Rome ; while his son 
and heir Commodus had no higher ambition 
than himself to enter the arena, after the 
fashion of many patrician youths of the 
period. 



CHAPTER XII. 

The reign of Commodus is recognized as 
the beginning of the political decline of the 
empire. The loathsome vice and brutality of 
this son of the great moralist could not be 
written ; and when he was strangled by one 
of his discarded favorites there was rejoicing 
in Rome. Of the twenty -five emperors who 
succeeded him ten were slain by their soldiers. 
It was the Praetorian Guards, after Commo- 
dus, who appointed the wearers of the Impe- 
rial purple, and if they might make emper- 
ors, they believed they might also unmake 
them, by slaying them, and when they com- 
menced the practice of giving the throne to 
the highest bidder, political degradation 
could go no farther. The reign of Septimius 
Severus, which was a period of wholesome 
military despotism, is a relief. The wall he 
built in Britain still stands as his memorial. 
He died at York while engaged in this work, 
and there soon followed the reign of his son, 



HISTORY OF ROME. 103 

Caracalla, of hideous memory (211-217 a. d.), 
whose first act was by one stroke of the pen 
to proscribe twenty thousand victims, because 
they wept for his brother and rival, Greta, 
over whose dead body he had climbed to the 
throne. We will not pause over the malig- 
nant cruelty of this being, who might have in- 
structed Nero in the art ; nor over Helioga- 
balus his successor (218-222 a.d.), of whom it 
was said, he could feel no appetite for his 
dinner, unless witnessing the shedding of 
human blood. 

Under Decius (250-268 a.d.) the Christian 
persecutions were recommenced with greater 
severity than ever before. The early Chris- 
tians had found an asylum in the catacombs 
of Rome ; now again those vast subterranean 
corridors lined with tombs became the ref- 
uge and the abode of thousands of the hunt- 
ed sect, traces of whom may still be found 
in the small mortuary chapels where they 
worshipped and sang their triumphant song 
— "Though He slay me, yet will I praise 
Him!" 

While this was happening the Goths were 
invading the empire on its northern frontier, 
Persia hostile in the east, and also many small 
centres of rebellion in Asia were claiming in- 



104 HISTORY OF ROME. 

dependence. At Palmyra the learned and 
fascinating Zenobia, after the death of her 
husband, had reigned with great ability and 
splendor, assuming to be not alone Queen of 
Palmyra and Syria, but of the eastern divi- 
sion of the Roman Empire. It was under 
Aurelian (270-275 a.d.) that Palmyra fell 
after a long siege, and the fleeing queen was 
captured and carried to Rome, where she 
adorned the magnificent triumph. Fettered 
with gold chains, the proud captive walked 
before the triumphal car of her captor, who 
then gallantly bestowed upon her a splendid 
villa at Tivoli, where she dwelt in sumptu- 
ous retirement. 

Rome no longer had the abounding vigor 
of her prime, when with her right hand she 
grasped Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Britain ; 
and with her left gathered in all the fruits of 
Alexander' s triumphs. Since the Goths had 
begun to press down upon her like a torrent ; 
since she was defending, not extending her 
borders, she began to find that her life-cur- 
rent was not swift and strong enough to 
keep her distant provinces in subjection. 
Zenobia was not the only rebel against her 
authority. And if the Praetorian Guards in 
the West might create emperors, the legions 



HISTORY OF ROME. 105 

in the East thought they also might do so. 
Anarchy and threatened dissolution led to 
an extraordinary measure, the decentraliza- 
tion of authority. Diocletian, for administra- 
tive purposes, divided the empire into four 
parts (284), three other cities sharing the au- 
thority with Rome. Although this was only 
temporary, it presaged the end. The prin- 
ciple of unity was the life of Rome, and 
when that was impaired or abandoned, as it 
was soon to be, the empire might by ingen- 
ious devices be reinforced, and its existence 
prolonged, but the life of the organism was 
departing ; its gigantic framework was be- 
ginning to weaken and to yield. 

The Emperor having restored the integrity 
of the empire in the East, determined to 
complete his work by a less difficult task at 
home — the extirpation of that mischievous 
Christian sect which was spreading with as- 
tonishing rapidity. A systematic persecu- 
tion was commenced. The one under De- 
cius had been cruel, but it did not approach 
in severity this final effort to exterminate the 
new religion. But it was in vain. Pano- 
plied in their sustaining faith, the ranks of 
the slain were immediately filled with men, 
women, and even children, who courted mar- 



106 HISTOEY OF ROME. 

tyrdom as the open door to heaven ; and 
when Diocletian became ill, and then abdi- 
cated, the attempt was abandoned. 

Constantine succeeded him, first as joint 
ruler in the East with Licinius ; but by the 
year 314 he was sole master of the empire. 
It is not probable that it was the caprice 
of a single man which converted the pagan 
empire into a Christian one. Here, in this 
strange faith, there existed a tremendous 
constructive force, an embodiment of unity, 
and of the associative principle. These had 
been the secret of the strength of Rome ; and 
she was dissolving because she had lost them. 
There was a power in this Christianity which 
bound men together, not as by bands of steel, 
but as if by an irresistible, self-recruiting 
force of nature. 

They could not destroy it, and so men wise 
in statesmanship doubtless saw the political 
expediency of adopting it. Whether Con- 
stantine had really learned to rely upon the 
God of the Christians, and whether he really 
saw a luminous cross in the heavens, who can 
tell? We only know that early in his reign 
the religion of the despised Nazarene was 
accepted by him, and the great Roman Em- 
pire became the standard-bearer of the Cross. 



HISTORY OF ROME. 107 

And when Constantine removed the seat of 
his empire to Byzantium, the newly chris- 
tened city of Constantinople was the capital 
of a Christianized Roman Empire. 

The Roman nation, with its cravings un- 
satisfied by Greek and Oriental philosophies, 
and sick and weary with a sense of moral 
degradation, embraced the new faith with 
rapture. Steeped to the lips in iniquity, 
they still might be cleansed ! By the waters 
of baptism, though their sins were as scarlet, 
they might be made white as snow. A great 
wave of reaction carried men into asceticism, 
some fleeing to the deserts, there to find re- 
generation by austerities ; and so in time 
monasticism was born. 

The Apostolic Church had first been or- 
ganized into communities under the rule of 
elders. In the second century, as it grew in 
numbers and in extent, there were created 
bishops, with a supervising care and an au- 
thority superior to that of the elders. From 
this nucleus started the organization of the. 
Church of Rome. There were now bishops 
of Rome, and of Antioch, and of Alexandria. 
But as Peter when he perished at Rome was 
the head of the Apostolic Church, so the 
bishops of Rome were his successors, and 



108 HISTORY OF ROME. 

had a precedence over the others. In this 
way, the hierarchy grew into form, and upon 
this historic relation to Peter, the founder of 
the Church, was based the claim of headship, 
which finally sundered the Greek and Ro- 
man churches. 

A triumphant Christianity had entered 
through two doors. One was the heart of 
the people, the other a political door. To 
the great, the powerful, those who were go- 
ing to control its destinies, the Christian 
faith meant a new source of strength for the 
empire. It was a coat of mail for its de- 
fence, and a weapon with which to smite its 
enemies. Emperors and their subordinates, 
fed and nourished on cruelty, were going to 
use the same ferocity in maintaining it that 
they had once used for its destruction. 
When historians express wonder that the 
gentle and persecuted Christians were so 
soon transformed into persecutors, they 
seem to forget that the faith of Christ 
was wrenched from the hands of His lowly 
followers and converted into an engine to 
be used for political ends. And one of the 
greatest miracles attending the history of 
Christianity is that so much of its purity and 
sanctity has survived this process of degra- 



HISTORY OF HOME. 109 

dation. But however corrupt, however 
cruel, however perverted from its original 
simplicity in belief and form, there were al- 
ways flowing, deep below the surface, uncon- 
taminated streams of religious fervor ; men 
and women with a faith as pure and as ex- 
alted as that of the first Disciples ; for which 
they were ready, like them, to die. This 
miracle of divine persistence never failed, 
and through ages of corruption has safely 
brought the living waters which nourish 
Christendom to-day. 

A time of unprecedented overturnings was 
at hand. The Huns had appeared in Europe 
(375 a.d.), and, like wolves, were driving be- 
fore them even the Goths, who poured down 
upon the Italian frontiers. It became evi- 
dent that the western division of the empire, 
including Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and 
Britain, could no longer be afforded protec- 
tion by Constantinople. In 395 a.d. the dis- 
memberment took place. There was an East- 
ern Empire and a Western Empire. The 
Eastern or Byzantine Empire, with compara- 
tive internal and external tranquillity, was 
going to stand in shining petrifaction for 
nearly a thousand years. But the Western 
Empire was crumbling — decay within and 



110 HISTOEY OF ROME. 

foes without. The Moors were threatening 
Africa. The Picts and Scots called for a 
strong hand in Britain, and most terrible of 
all, the Visigoths under Alaric were boldly 
invading northern Italy; besieging Milan, 
attacking Florence, then plundering, destroy- 
ing, burning, as they made their way to the 
Eternal City. Never but once — 600 years 
before — had foreign feet profaned the streets 
of Rome. Slaves within the city opened a 
gate to their kinsmen encamped without ; 
and at midnight the awful moment arrived 
when, with a wild shout, the Goths were in 
Rome. The horrors of the sacking and the 
burning need not be dwelt upon. 

The scattering of patrician families conse- 
quent upon this pillage and devastation, for- 
ever dispersed the traditional elements which 
made Rome so sacred. All of Italy was sub- 
ject to the Visigoths, who were also in Gaul 
and in Spain. The Angles and the Saxons 
were in Britain, and the Vandals in Africa. 
Rome, herself almost submerged, saw the 
dark waters of this northern deluge flowing 
over the entire empire in the West. 

The death of Alaric in 410, and the advent 
of Ataulf, his brother and successor, as 
head of the Visigoths, temporarily stayed the 



HISTORY OF ROME. Ill 

course of events. Ataulf loved and had car- 
ried away Placidia, sister of the recent Em- 
peror Honorius. He was an admirer of Ro- 
man civilization, and approved of preserving 
it as a foundation for a Gothic structure, 
rather than destroying it. So he restored the 
empire in name, and withdrew with his Ro- 
man bride, Placidia, to Spain, there to found 
a Visigoth Empire. So for some decades 
longer emperors bearing the name, but with 
no actual power, flit like ghosts across the 
page of history, the barbarians deciding 
who should and who should not wear the im- 
perial purple. 

Rome was not defiled by the feet of Attila 
and his Huns, although they fiercely ravaged 
Italy. But the Vandals visited it with fire 
and with sword and ins alt. Genseric, fol- 
lowing the lines of the old Carthaginian Em- 
pire, was creating a huge Vandal Empire, and 
was master of the Mediterranean — that prize 
for which ancient nations had once so fiercely 
struggled. He, with his Vandals and his 
Moors, visited Rome with destruction and 
degrading insult (455 a.d.), and after four- 
teen devastating days, they carried all the 
portable treasure to Carthage, leaving only 
what was rooted to the ground. This final 



112 HISTOKY OF ROME. 

humiliation extinguished the nickering spark 
of life in the expiring empire, and in 495 a.d. 
the Roman Senate performed its last act. 
It transferred the supreme authority to 
Odoacer, chief of a German tribe, and a 
Goth was King of Rome and Sovereign of 
Italy. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



CHAPTER I. 



The time had passed when "Rome was 
the whole world, and all the world was 
Rome." That crater through which had 
poured the volcanic energies of the mighty 
empire was awfully still. But those ener- 
gies were sleeping, not dead. The instinct 
for power, the old thirst for mastery, the 
same genius for organization, were rinding 
a new pathway, and were preparing to 
convert the forlorn, dismantled city into the 
throne of a universal empire. 

The least spiritual of nations was creat- 
ing a spiritual kingdom, into which it would 
inject its own dominating strength. By con- 
trolling the sources of action, it might be 
master of men and of events. By holding 
the consciences and hearts of humanity in 
one hand, and the keys to heaven and hell in 



116 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

the other, a power might be wielded deep as 
human consciousness, and wide as the earth 
itself. There existed no such plan in the 
minds of the devout early bishops of Rome. 
But such was the instinctive process at work, 
as surely and as irresistibly as a mighty 
river if obstructed will find a new way to 
the sea. When before trembling souls were 
held up the horrors of eternal punishment, 
which might be remitted, and the tortures of 
purgatory shortened by gifts to the Church, 
money poured in great streams into the 
treasury. Dying sinners, even if half pa- 
gan, would leave their all, for the chance of 
purchasing forgiveness. This meant wealth 
and power never before possessed by a single 
organization. Ecclesiasticism was the road 
to success, and to be Bishop of Rome the 
richest prize offered to ambition, men still 
pagans at heart entering the lists to obtain 
it. The bishop, the custodian of this wealth, 
which he lavishly dispensed in charity and in 
deeds of mercy, was to the common people 
the adored father, or, as he began to be 
called, Papa (from the Greek), the word as- 
suming in English the form "Pope." 

The Greek and Oriental spirit which had 
come to pervade the Eastern Empire was 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 117 

making of Eastern Christianity something 
quite different from that of the West. There 
were different ideas of church government, 
and finally a different understanding of the 
dogmas of the Church concerning the nature 
of the Trinity. The assumption of headship 
by the Bishop of Rome, by virtue of an 
apostolic succession, was indignantly repu- 
diated, and when the Pope asserted his 
authority by virtue of this headship to de- 
cide what were the dogmas of the faith, the 
Eastern Christians resolved upon a separa- 
tion ; and the Church of Christ on earth fell 
apart into two bodies— the Greek Church, 
with its seat at Constantinople, and the Ro- 
man, to be enthroned at Rome. 

It was a period of transition and of prepa- 
ration. The rough foundations of future 
Europe were being laid. A Visigoth king- 
dom, established by Ataulf, held in subjection 
Romanized Spain. The Angles and Saxons 
had divided the Roman province of Britain 
between themselves and created a heptarchy 
which was to become a monarchy ; Clovis, 
newly Christianized, had fastened a Frank- 
ish kingdom upon the Romanized and still 
pagan Gauls, and crowded the Visigoths 
over the Pyrenees. In Central Europe was 



118 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

a surging mass of Germanic tribes, never at 
rest, but with a general movement always 
toward the South, where their kinsmen, the 
Goths and Vandals, had already found 
homes of bewildering luxury ready for their 
use, and were fast acquiring the arts of civ- 
ilization. In the region beyond, in the East, 
was another tumultuous mass of tribes, of 
which nothing was known yet — Slavonic, 
Finnish, Bulgarian, and strange Asiatic bar- 
barians — all beginning to be drawn like 
moths toward the blazing illumination at 
Constantinople, the centre of that Byzantine 
Empire about which would revolve the am- 
bitions and aspirations of what was to be- 
come Russia. 

Although sundered in its spiritual life 
from the Empire of the West, Constantino- 
ple still claimed a shadowy political unity, 
and asserted an unsubstantial authority over 
the destinies of Rome and of Italy, which 
was for two centuries represented by an ex- 
arch at Ravenna, this exarchate being the 
nominal centre of Byzantine authority in 
the West. 

But the Goths, barbarians though they 
were, did not learn of Christianity from Rome. 
More than a century before the fall of the 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 119 

empire they liad received it in its- primitive 
simplicity from Ulfilas, the Christian boy 
from Syria whom they had captured, and 
who created a Gothic alphabet and then 
translated his Bible into their tongue, ex- 
plaining its truths in his own artless fashion, 
as they had been taught in his native land by 
Arius. The Roman Church had accepted, 
at the Council of Nice (327), the truth as ex- 
pounded by Athanasius, making the Trinity 
the most sacred of its dogmas. So the Chris- 
tianity of the Goths, which rejected the idea 
of the Trinity, was by Roman standards a 
very abominable heresy, and rivers of blood 
were to flow in Italy and in Spain before it 
was washed out by a triumphant trinita- 
rianism. 

The Gothic nation, like the Roman Empire, 
had separated into a Western and an Eastern 
division. And while the Visigoths had long 
since overrun Italy, Gaul, and Spain, the 
home of the Ostrogoths was still far north of 
the Danube. On the day of a great victory 
over the Huns, a son had been born to the 
King of the Ostrogoths. So the child of this 
good omen was called Theodoric — gift of 
God. When Odoacer became King of Italy, 
Theodoric was twenty-one years old. Seven 



120 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

hundred miles stretched between him and 
the throne of Italy, but he determined to 
possess it. By the year 492 he had wrenched 
the prize from Odoacer. He had not mis- 
taken his strength nor his ability. Theo- 
doric's is one of the few names to which by 
common consent has been attached the word 
" Great." When we compare this wise, en- 
lightened, and humane reign with that of 
some of the human tigers who had worn the 
name of Caesar, we conclude that the barbae 
ians brought something more than rugged 
strength into the expiring civilization. They 
brought some human elements which had 
been fatally lacking in the Romans. Terri- 
ble in wrath and in vengeance, the Goths 
had capacity for gentle emotions. Cruelty 
was their weapon, not their pastime. They 
did not with epicurean pleasure taste human 
blood with their wine. If Theodoric ordered 
the execution of his friend Boethius, the 
learned scholar, musician, and mathemati- 
cian, it was because he believed he was trying 
to undermine the Arian faith, the religion of 
his people ; but the remorse which overtook 
the barbarian king was the cause of his 
death (526 a.d.). The wife of this remarkable 
man was a sister of Clovis, and the magnifi- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 121 

cent monument erected by his daughter over 
his sarcophagus still remains at Ravenna. 

With the strong hand of the king re- 
moved, Justinian, Emperor of the East, saw 
his opportunity to reconquer Italy. He 
sent his army under Belisarius, and first 
captured Sicily. A few soldiers crawling 
through an abandoned aqueduct entered the 
city of Naples, and then opened the gates 
to the besieging army. Rome quickly sur- 
rendered, and the keys of the city were sent 
as a trophy to Constantinople (537). The 
Goths then in turn besieged Rome, and then 
it was that Hadrian's tomb, now the castle 
of St. Angelo, was first used as a fortress, 
and priceless statues (four thousand it is 
said), the work of famous Greek sculptors, 
were hurled from the walls, and fell crash- 
ing down upon the heads of the besieging 
Goths, so terrifying them that they fled. 

When Justinian died, in 565, Italy was 
practically recovered. But the rule was op- 
pressive, and some even desired a return of 
the Goths. 

The Lombards were a fierce Germanic 
tribe originally from Northern Prussia, 
which had been, like all the others, gravitat- 
ing toward Italy, watching an opportunity 



122 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

to slip inside that tempting garden through 
some open door. In the present conditions 
they saw their opportunity. Their descent 
into Northern Italy is still kept in remem- 
brance by the name Lombardy, that beauti- 
ful region lying between the Alps and the 
Apennines. It was another instance of 
rugged untamed power coining out of the 
North to subdue the South. The terrified 
people fled before them, and by the end of 
the century these last barbarians had di- 
vided the peninsula with the Greek Empire. 
During the following century (the seventh) 
there were three centres of power in Italy — 
the Eastern Empire, which held Southern 
Italy and the eastern coast ; the Lombards, 
who were supreme in Northern Italy to the 
borders of Venetia ; and the Pope. Among 
these three, it was the power of the Pope 
which was ascending. It knew no geo- 
graphical, no political limits. It was as 
powerful in the Frankish kingdom and in 
Christianized Britain as at Rome. From the 
king on the throne to the humblest of the 
people, wherever there were true children 
of the Church, wherever there were stricken 
consciences or aching hearts, there were his 
subjects. The presence of Arianism was 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



123 



the greatest difficulty in the path, and the 
Church had been greatly strengthened by 
the conversion of Theodolinda, the wife of the 
King of the Lombards, to the true faith, and 
the consequent rejection of the Arian heresy 
by the Lombards. The famous "Iron Crown 
of Lombardy," now preserved near Milan, 
was a gift to the Lombard Queen from Greg- 
ory the Great in recognition of this service. 

Precisely at this time there came into the 
world one of the greatest factors in shaping 
human events. Since Rome had raised the 
cross as a symbol of empire, the world had 
discovered the enormous power which might 
be wielded by holding the spiritual con- 
sciousness of man. The sincere purpose of 
Mahomet to replace a corrupt polytheism 
with a simple belief in one God, of whom he 
was the prophet, was seized upon by the wise 
and crafty Saracens. With the Koran in one 
hand, the sword in the other, and the cres- 
cent as their emblem, they determined to 
proselyte the world. They conquered Per- 
sia, Syria, and Egypt, and then swept along 
the African coast, effacing the Vandal Em- 
pire, not pausing until they reached the 
ocean. Their purpose of universal domin- 
ion was as much greater than Alexander's 



124 HISTOET OF ITALY. 

as the world was greater than the one in his 
time. The Church of Christ, which was the 
object of Saracen hatred, had two heads, 
and their plan included the destruction of 
both. They would enter Europe by the way 
of Spain, then cross the Pyrenees into 
France. Another Saracen host, after con- 
quering Constantinople, would flow west- 
ward ; and when the two streams met at 
Rome, the world would be theirs. 

In 709 the movement began. The Visigoth 
Kingdom in Spain, now three centuries old. 
was swept out of existence, and a Moorish 
occupation of the Spanish peninsula began, 
which was to last seven hundred years. 
But at the Pyrenees the Saracens, or Moors 
as they are now called, were met by a Frank- 
ish army led by Charles Martel, which drove 
them back with such fury that there was 
never another attempt made to cross that 
barrier. Six hundred years were to elapse 
before the crescent would wave over Con- 
stantinople. But in all those years the 
shadow of the coming disaster would rest 
upon the Eastern Empire, which would be 
gradually weakened and exhausted by con- 
flicts with her future destroyer. 



CHAPTER II. 

Near the end of the eighth century the 
King of the Lombards captured Kavenna, 
and in annexing the territory which was the 
nominal seat of the imperial government, 
put an end to the exarchate which had ex- 
isted for two centuries. Alboin's ambition 
was now fired to achieve a greater triumph, 
i.e., a complete ascendancy in the peninsula. 
This attempt, in itself so fruitless, changed 
the whole course of European history. The 
Merovingian kings were faithful sons of the 
Church, so the Pope appealed to the Franks 
to protect him from the Lombard encroach- 
ments, and Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, 
came twice across the Alps with an army, 
checked the ambition of the Lombards by a 
conquest which made him virtual sovereign, 
then, upon leaving, cast an imperial gift into 
the lap of the Church — five cities and a vast 
extent of territory. This, known as the " Do- 
nation of Pepin," was the beginning of the 



126 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

temporal kingdom of the popes in Italy. 
Pepin. Jlaire du Palais of the last Mero- 
vingian king, resolved, since he held the king- 
ly power, also to assume the kingly crown. 
Pope Zacharias. in gratitude for his gift to 
the Church, sanctioned the audacious act, 
and sent his representative to place the sym- 
bol of power upon the head of his faithful son. 
When Pope Adrian I. again needed pro- 
tection from the Lombards, a greater than 
Pepin wore the crown he had snatched from 
the Merovingian. His son Charlemagne was 
King of the Franks. The tie uniting the 
Eastern Empire and the Western was worn 
to a frail thread ; with hostile religions, and 
characters which had grown utterly diver- 
gent, the union was a mockery. The wretch- 
ed Irene,, who put out the eyes of her own son 
in order that she might reign, was disgracing 
the throne. Charlemagne's services to the 
Church were unequalled. A man who could 
compel a whole army of pagan Saxons to be 
baptized in an afternoon, and Christianize a 
nation in a campaign, was the sort of ally the 
Pope needed. So when Pope Adrian I. asked 
for protection. Charlemagne, with fully ma- 
tured plans, came himself, and with the con- 
sent and acquiescence of the Pope, he took 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 127 

formal possession of Italy, and the centre of 
power returned from the East to the West. 

On Christmas Day in the year 800, Charle- 
magne knelt before the high altar at St. 
Peter's in Rome, while Leo III. placed upon 
his head the crown which made him "By 
the Grace of Grod, Emperor of the Romans 
and of the Holy Roman Empire." By these 
words the present was deftly linked to the 
past, and Charlemagne had become the suc- 
cessor of Augustus and of Constantine. 
The line of Caesar which had been prolonged 
in the East would be continued through 
Charlemagne's successors in the West. The 
Roman Church, instead of being politically 
joined to its enemy, was in natural alliance 
with its most ardent and powerful defender. 
In the compact formed between the Emperor 
and the Pope there was a mutual dependence. 
The election of the Pope required the sanc- 
tion of the Emperor. Nor was the King of 
the Franks emperor until crowned by the 
Pope. In this friendly clause there lurked 
material for many .troubled centuries, and 
the writing of many histories ! The wonder 
is that a statesman as astute as Charlemagne 
did not, as a condition, then and there fix 
the question of supremacy. But he did not 



128 HISTOKY OF ITALY. 

realize the extraordinary nature of the power 
with which he was in alliance, any more 
than did the Pope suspect the turn of events 
which would make him the vassal of Ger- 
man emperors. Upon the death of Charle- 
magne, his empire was divided among his 
sons into three parts. Louis took the East- 
ern and German Franks, Charles the West- 
ern and Latinized Franks, and to Lothar was 
assigned the imperial title together with 
Italy, and a long narrow strip of territory 
extending to the North Sea. Instead of 
being in natural and close alliance with Lat- 
inized France, Italy found herself irrevoca- 
bly tied to the Germans, a Teutonic people 
with which she had nothing in common. 

The great states of modern Europe had now 
all come into being. Italy, France, Spain, 
from their infancy nourished by currents 
from the ancient world, were the children 
and the heirs of Latin civilization. England, 
Germany, Russia, all born in this pregnant 
century, were in no way linked with the 
past. They were children of new and ob- 
scure parentage. Of the Roman occupation 
in Britain there remained not a trace after 
the coming of the Angles and Saxons. Ger- 
many, the one state where Roman power 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 129 

could not get a foothold, had not an ances- 
tral root extending beyond her native soil ; 
while Russia, the strangest ethnic product 
of all, the Slav blended with utterly un- 
known Asiatic fragments, was going to sit 
at the feet of the expiring Byzantine Empire 
and learn its first lesson in civilization. It 
was at the very time Charlemagne was being 
crowned at Rome, in the year 800, that the 
heptarchy in Britain was consolidated and 
King Alfred reigned over England. The 
treaty of Yerdun in 840 created Germany ; 
and in 862 a few Slavonic tribes were 
brought into political union by the Scandi- 
navian Rurik, who reigned as " Grand 
Prince" at Kieff, over what was to become 
Muscovite Russia. 

By the eleventh century feudalism had 
organized new social conditions in all of 
these states (except Russia). Great nobles 
in Germany dwelt in castles which were also 
their strongholds in the private wars which 
prevailed. The narrow strip of territory ex- 
tending to the North Sea had widened and 
grown into a powerful and compact king- 
dom ; while Italy was the prey of anarchy 
and disorders, led by aristocratic factions in 
league with a Church growing every year 



130 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

more corrupt. Needing the political tie 
binding her to Germany, she none the less 
hated it. On the other hand, the authority 
of the popes, although sometimes appealed 
to in disputes concerning the succession, was 
detested by the Gfermans, and the necessity 
of going to Rome for the imperial crown was 
so exasperating that some preferred to dis- 
pense with it. A deep antagonism was de- 
veloping between emperors and popes. The 
Church had become unspeakably corrupt. 
For a long period the character of nearly 
every occupant of the papal chair had been 
stained with vice too gross to be described, 
and the name "Holy Father" had become a 
mockery. 

The very enormity of the condition pro- 
duced a reaction. A party of reform came 
into existence in Italy, led by the fiery monk 
Hildebrand. An ascetic, with exalted ideas 
of the sanctity and the authority of the papal 
office, he made two things his determined 
aim : the purification of the Church, and 
divesting the Emperor of the power of inves- 
titure or the bestowal of the papal dignity 
— a privilege not often exercised, but prized 
for its potential usefulness. 

When Hildebrand became Pope Gregory 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 131 

VII., a still larger purpose developed. He 
it was who first made the monstrous claim 
that not alone German emperors, but all 
sovereigns, were subject to the Pope, and 
bound by his decisions. Christ was the 
King of Kings : and so, as his vicegerent, the 
Pope's authority was absolute in Christen- 
dom, and from it there was no appeal. 

Henry IV., Emperor of Gfermany, in some 
dispute had asked Pope Gregory' s interposi- 
tion. In reply, the Pope imperiously com- 
manded the Emperor's immediate presence 
at Home to answer charges against himself. 
The long-impending crisis had come. The 
point Charlemagne had failed to determine, 
whether Pope or Emperor was the greater, 
Hildebrand was going to decide for all time. 

Henry not only indignantly refused to 
obey, but deposed the Pope. Whereupon 
the Pope excommunicated Henry. 

One can scarcely realize now what this 
meant at that time. Excommunication was 
a word before which the strongest quailed. 
It was not only eternal torture hereafter, 
but a living death here. The excommuni- 
cated was cut off from human association ; 
people approached him at their peril ; the 
clothes he wore, the dishes from which he 



132 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

ate, were polluted. He was a moral leper. 
Henry's subjects threatened to elect a new 
emperor unless he made his peace at once 
with the offended Church. So, as has been 
often told, the royal penitent started in mid- 
winter upon his famous pilgrimage to Ca- 
nossa, in coarsest garb, bare-headed, bare- 
footed, standing for three days outside the 
castle walls waiting for forgiveness and abso- 
lution (1073 a.d.). 

Such was the power of the Church when 
in 1095 the kingdoms of Europe enrolled 
themselves under its banners to recover 
the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens. The 
principle of unity of which ancient Eome 
was the monstrous embodiment had passed 
into the spiritual empire which was its suc- 
cessor. How could there be political growth 
in Italy with a man arrogating to himself 
divine powers enthroned in the very heart 
of the peninsula, before whose authority 
kings and armies trembled ? What political 
organization could stand with a papal king- 
dom as its centre 3 There might be king- 
doms and principalities and small centres of 
power outside of it — if not too ambitious and 
outreaching. And that is just what there 
were going to be for many centuries. 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 



133 



At this period the restless people who 
had for a century occupied the province 
of Normandy in France under promise of 
good behavior, were looking about for new 
fields of adventure. While William, Duke of 
Normandy, was eagerly watching the turn 
of affairs just across the channel in Eng- 
land, his knights were roaming the Mediter- 
ranean shores, offering their services some- 
times to the Greek Empire in fighting the 
Saracens, sometimes to Southern Italy in re- 
pelling the Greek Empire. A certain Tan- 
cred d' Hauteville had ten of these advent- 
urous sons, who had in this way become prac- 
tically masters of Magna Grsecia, all the 
fruits of their knightly adventures finally 
coming into the hands of one son, Robert, 
known as Robert Guiscard (or the crafty), 
who, as head of a great dukedom embracing 
all of Southern Italy, now became a power 
to be reckoned with. When his younger 
brother, Roger, wrested Sicily from the Sara- 
cens (1702 a.d.), the fair island was reunited 
with Italy, forming one kingdom with Na- 
ples, over which a later Roger Guiscard was 
crowned by the Pope, King of Naples, or, as 
it was thereafter known, "the kingdom of 
the two Sicilies.' ' While the host of Norman 



134 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



knights were following William into Eng- 
land, a smaller host were streaming south- 
ward, bringing the same brilliant receptive- 
ness and masterful energy into Italy, where 
they were going to survive as in France, and 
in England, and in Russia, not as a race, 
but as an element. 

So in the twelfth century, with the Nor- 
man Kingdom in the south, and the Lom- 
bard Kingdom in the north of Italy, the 
Papal Territory and the independent state 
of Venice represented all of authority that 
was Italian. 

Since the crusades the European states 
had been drawn into a closer relation ; the 
currents of political sentiment in one country 
would flow into another, and thus great 
tides or waves of tendency would roll over 
the Continent as if it were one organism. 
One of these movements was the rise of free 
cities in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. 
It had its origin in a desire for some refuge 
from the everlasting unrest, from the eter- 
nal conflict, where small communities, still 
acknowledging the paramount authority, 
might behind their own walls work out their 
own problem of government and develop- 
ment. A remarkable group of free cities 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



135 



had formed in Lombardy. The burghers 
shut themselves behind their walls from the 
general political storm, and also from the 
exactions and oppressions of feudal lords, 
whose fortresses studded the country ; then 
they would cautiously open the gates to 
someone among the superior class whom 
they believed would strengthen them, and 
bestow upon him a seat or an office in their 
government council. Such was the process 
by which they had grown. Milan, which 
was the oldest, largest, and most important 
of the group, assumed a headship. No idea 
of combination existed. The disintegrating 
fires of envy, jealousy, and hatred were at 
work keeping the cities as far apart from 
each other as had been Athens and Sparta. 
Milan tried to annihilate Lodi, and the little 
Cremona had a still smaller victim in the 
little city of Crema. It was the old story of 
the Greek republics. Times had been bad 
enough without this needless civil war, 
with twelve armed invasions by the em- 
perors of Germany in two centuries, putting 
down as many attempts to set up their own 
Italian kings in Lombardy ! A crisis finally 
came when Lodi in desperation appealed to 
the Emperor Frederick I. — the great Bar- 



136 



HTST0EY OF ITALY. 



barossa. When the Emperor sustained Lodi 
in her quarrel with Milan, that imperious 
city refused to submit to his dictation. The 
Emperor had been watching these small cen- 
tres of political freedom, which had cast off 
their feudal allegiance, and the allegiance to 
their bishop. Xow they were defying him. 
He meant to teach a lesson which would not 
be forgotten. He marched down to the re- 
bellious city and literally tore it to pieces; 
then invited the neighboring cities to come 
and help themselves to the fragments ; 
which they did with such ferocious zeal 
that nothing remained. Milan, the beauti- 
ful city, the pride of Lombardy. was effaced. 
Such extravagant vengeance produced a 
sympathetic reaction. The Milanese were 
assisted to rebuild their city, and to guard 
against future tyrannical interference from 
Emperor Frederick, there was formed a 
league of twenty-five cities. This is the fa- 
mous Lombard League to which the great 
Barbarossa yielded in 1113. when he con- 
ceded the rights of individual cities to gov- 
ern themselves, the general sovereignty of 
the Emperor at the same time remaining un- 
impaired. 



CHAPTER III. 

The life of the Norman Kingdom in Italy- 
was brief as it was brilliant. Constance, the 
daughter of King Roger I., married Henry, 
son of Barbarossa. So in the absence of 
a male heir, before the end of the twelfth 
century, the whole territory acquired by the 
Guiscard brothers was transferred to Henry 
VI., then Emperor of Germany, who now 
claimed to hold in his hand all of Italy ex- 
cepting only the papal dominions, the inde- 
pendent state of Venice, and the free cities 
of the North. Pope Urban IV., after a 
prolonged and fruitless attempt to prevent 
such a calamity, invited Charles, Duke of 
Anjou, brother of Louis IX. of France (the 
saint), to come and wear the crown of 
Naples and Sicily. Charles accepted the in- 
vitation, drove out Manfred, the illegitimate 
son of Frederick II., and was proclaimed 
king of the Two Sicilies. The wretched 
chapter closes with two tragedies — one pa- 



138 HISTORY OP ITALY. 

thetic, the other colossal. The last of the 
Hohenstaufens, Conradin, a boy sixteen 
years old, came with an army and with ban- 
ners and with enthusiasm to claim his own 
and drive out the usurper. He was de- 
feated and delivered to Charles, who dared 
not take the chances of leaving alive so 
winning and so just a claimant to his throne. 
On the shore of the Bay of Naples the scaf- 
fold was erected'. After a brief prayer the 
boy threw his glove among the weeping 
friends near him, as if it were a charge to 
avenge his death, then gave himself to the 
executioner. 

So detested did the rule of the French be- 
come that it needed only a spark to start a 
conflagration. An insult offered by a French 
officer to a Sicilian maiden on her way to 
vespers with her affianced husband precipi- 
tated the outbreak which had been for some 
time preparing. The officer was killed on 
the spot, and a massacre of the French in 
Palermo instantly began, the contagion 
spreading to other towns, until not a French- 
man remained in the island. This, known 
as the " Sicilian Vespers," occurred in 1282. 
The island of Sicily was taken away from 
Charles, and bestowed by the Pope upon 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



139 



Pedro III., King of Arragon, Naples remain- 
ing to Charles. 

So now there were three foreign masters in 
Italy, and the free cities instead of drawing 
closer together for mutual protection were 
wasting their strength in embittered rival- 
ries, each of these cities at the same time be- 
ing rent asunder by strife between the two 
political parties, the Guelfs and Ghibellines. 
There had arisen in the twelfth century two 
political parties — the party of the Pope, and 
the party of the Emperor. The adherents 
of the Pope were called Gfuelfs, and those 
of the Emperor, Ghibellines. These names 
gradually outgrew their original significance 
and came to express two opposing tenden- 
cies ; tendencies which we should now call 
conservative and radical. The Guelfs stood 
for a. new Italy, with feudalism effaced, 
commerce fostered, and a leaning toward 
republicanism. The name Ghibelline stood 
for a protest against any changes in the old 
order of things. But what these names 
chiefly represented was an unintelligent 
destructive force. They afforded banners 
under which people could enroll themselves 
in carrying on traditional feuds and private 
hatreds, joining this or that faction as it 



140 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

would help them to build up or to ruin. 
The long and purposeless struggle between 
Guelfs and Ghibellines was even more det- 
rimental to Italy than foreign oppression, 
because it was disintegrating, a quality 
which opens the shortest road to dissolu- 
tion. 

While the history of the Italian peninsula 
in ancient times is a single thread, it had now 
become a strand composed of many threads of 
almost equal value. Venice, Florence, Pisa, 
Genoa, and Milan formed a group of auton- 
omous states which seemed more like the 
children of Greece than of Rome. Each was 
an intense expression of political individual- 
ism. Each was grasping for power and wealth 
and territory, and with a strange instinct 
for beauty, lavish in expenditure for embel- 
lishment, they were vying with each other in 
the growing splendor of their cities. In Flor- 
ence, Pisano and Cimabue were already 
teaching the principles of the art of beauty, 
and the stately group of buildings which men 
still travel far to see were rearing their 
heads. Venice, looking across the Adriatic 
toward Greece and the Orient, had for two 
centuries been studying art at the feet of 
the greatest masters. As "she sat in state 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 141 

throned on her hundred isles," the Church 
of St. Mark's and a multitude of shining 
palaces had already arisen from the waves, 
which gave back their shimmering reflec- 
tions just as they do to-day. These marvel- 
lous creations were clothed in the garment 
of an ancient civilization, the " spoils of na- 
tions," from "the exhaustless East," which 
the conquering Venetians had brought bodi- 
ly to make their city beautiful, as should be 
the " Bride of the Sea" ! This splendor of 
adornment tells the story of conquest and 
outreaching power and of commercial suc- 
cess which made it possible, and which made 
Venice the object of jealous hatred to Pisa, 
her sister city on the Mediterranean, who 
also had her own brilliant conquests and 
prosperity, owning the islands of Sardinia 
(taken from the Moors), Elba, and a large 
part of Corsica, besides colonies in the East, 
all of which riches, on the other hand, excited 
the envious hatred of Genoa, which was to be 
the cause of her final downfall. 

The situation of Florence was less favor- 
able for the extension of her borders than 
for development within herself. The fer- 
tility of her soil, the perfection of her cli- 
mate, and perhaps the slight retirement from 



142 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

the restless sea, centred her energies in the 
productive industries which were the source 
of her enormous wealth and lasting vitality. 
As the merchants, the wealth-producing 
class, were not noble, there was a constant 
recruiting of the energies of the state from 
below, a process which always insures long 
life, so that a plebeian plutocracy, although 
a present evil, is apt to be a future good. 

All these cities had in their administration 
a shadowy survival of ancient Rome, with 
their two consuls, and a senate elected by 
the people. But on account of the distract- 
ing quarrels of the Gruelfs and Ghibellines 
it became necessary to devise a new system, 
and then came into existence a chief magis- 
trate with dictatorial powers, called podesta. 
This official was always a stranger, who on 
account of known probity and wisdom was 
invited to come and govern them for one 
year. During this period he must not enter 
the house of any private citizen, nor must 
he bring with him his family. This solitary 
person was expected by these restrictions to 
be kept safe from pernicious local influences. 
While ingenious and perhaps to some ex- 
tent wise, this was, however, teaching the 
people to be submissive to a possible tyrant. 



HISTOKY OF ITALY. 143 

Later, in order to defend themselves from 
the insolence of the nobility, the people 
created another singular functionary, called 
the gonfalonier, or bearer of the standard 
(gonfalon). His duty, like that of the 
tribunes, was to suppress attacks on the 
liberties of the people, an army of men al- 
ways standing ready the instant he hung 
out his gonfalon, to rush to his aid against 
any refractory noble. 

In no other city did party feeling run so 
high between Guelf and Ghibelline as in 
Florence, the victory of one faction meaning 
unsparing vengeance upon the other. Of 
course the conflict of classes and private 
feuds and personal aims became intermin- 
gled and entangled with the larger classifi- 
cation. A system devised to hold the tur- 
bulent elements in check was finally adopted, 
which lasted for two centuries. Twelve men, 
called the Signoria, were elected once in two 
months, who acted as aids to the podesta. 
The Florence of this period had its learned 
class, who, under the shadow of the rising 
Duomo, and the Baptistery, discussed the 
opposing views of Aquinas and Duns Scotus, 
or, as is even more likely, the marvellous 
tales brought from the fabled East by the 



144 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

Venetian traveller Marco Polo, or the latest 
utterance of their hot-headed and erratic 
townsman, Dante. As the sympathies of 
the present day naturally turn to the Guelfic 
party of that time, it is something of a 
shock to learn that Dante was intensely 
Ghibelline or imperialistic. He was elected 
in 1300 one of the priors of the republic ; 
that is, a member of the Signoria or grand 
council. While he was at one time absent 
at Rome upon official business, the Guelfic 
party triumphed, and he, with the rest, was 
condemned to have his property confiscated, 
and for him was added the promise that he 
would be burnt alive if he ever returned to 
Florence. So, homeless, and in poverty, and 
in bitterness of heart, the exile completed the 
Divine Comedy which he had commenced, 
in rage deep but impotent using his pen, 
the only weapon with which he could strike 
back, by holding up to execration forever 
the men who had ruined him, and who, as he 
believed, were destroying his beloved Flor- 
ence. 

Pisa had also her diiomo, baptistery, and 
her leaning tower proudly rearing their 
heads. The story of Count Ugolino shows 
what sort of hearts dwelt in this Ghibelline 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 145 

city. This nobleman to whom had been 
confided the state at a time of great peril, 
improved the opportunity to establish a 
tyranny of his own. His treachery was dis- 
covered, and the wrath of the people may be 
measured by the punishment inflicted, which 
Dante has pictured with such fearful power. 
Ugolino, his two sons and two grandsons 
were thrown into prison. After the lock 
had been turned upon them, the key was 
thrown into the Arno, and the five were left 
to perish slowly by starvation. It needed 
not the imagination of a Dante to make 
an " Inferno" of such a lingering tragedy. 
The power of Pisa had been sapped by a 
long struggle with Genoa, and in 1241, after 
a naval defeat at the mouth of the Arno, so 
completely was she stripped of her former 
glory, that it was said, "If you would see 
Pisa, you must go to Genoa." 

After the fourth crusade, one might truly 
have said, If you would see Constantinople, 
you must go to Venice. A great Christian 
host which had gathered with the purpose 
of making one more attempt to recover Pal- 
estine had assembled at Venice, where they 
awaited the money required for the expedi- 
tion. Finally, as it did not come, Dandolo, 



ue 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



the Doge of Venice, offered to supply the re- 
quired amount if instead of Palestine they 
would make Zara, a rebellious Venetian town 
on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, their 
first objective point. This having been done, 
the infamous proposition was next artfully 
made, as they still needed money, that they 
join the Venetians in an attack upon Con- 
stantinople, where there was an empty 
throne standing between two contestants. 
The result of this was that an army of cru- 
saders with the avowed purpose of pillage 
took possession of Constantinople, and after 
committing every outrage which can attend 
the sacking of a city, they bore away to 
Venice an amount of plunder which cannot 
be estimated, and which still clothes the city 
of the winged lion with gold and silver and 
jewels and priceless works of art. The four 
bronze horses, which adorn the portal to St. 
Mark' s Church, were a part of this disgrace- 
ful spoil. They are said to have been made 
during the reign of either Nero or Trajan by 
Roman workmanship. 

Venice, which was the oldest of the autono- 
mous states, had hitherto cared little for 
extension in Italy, her ambitions and desires 
all turning toward the East, which possessed 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 147 

Tor her such a fascination. But in the thir- 
teenth century a struggle commenced with 
Genoa, which lasted for thirty years. Her 
Duke, or Doge, was elected by the people, as 
was also the Senate, which shared his author- 
ities. Gradually the democratic principle 
had been disappearing, and an aristocratic 
body called the " Grand Council " was by 
degrees absorbing the powers of government, 
the Senate finally becoming hereditary in a 
few families. It was when not yet fully in 
the clutches of her aristocracy, when her 
merchant princes were the carriers for the 
world, and when, sitting at the gateway lead- 
ing to the East, she was taking toll for the 
traffic of Europe, that Venice reached the 
height of her glory. 



CHAPTER IV. 

The century just closing had wrought 
many changes in Europe. It had given 
to England the foundation for her liberties 
in the Magna Charta. In France the period 
of free cities had passed, and the principle 
of monarchy was gaining upon a waning 
feudalism. The descendants of the Visigoth 
kings of Spain as they fought their long 
crusade of centuries, were slowly crowding 
the Moors down toward their last strong- 
hold in the province of Granada. In Ger- 
many the house of Hohenstaufen had given 
place to the house of Hapsburg. Russia 
was in the grasp of the Mongols, but with a 
steady impulse toward power of a phenome- 
nal sort, the nebulous mass was preparing 
to revolve about its new centre at Moscow. 

To none had the thirteenth century been 
more significant than to the papal empire at 
Rome. TThen Pope Innocent III. brought 
that odious tyrant, King John of England, 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



149 



cringing to Ms feet, Hildebrand' s claim of 
papal supremacy had been established. 
That contumacious King refused to accept 
an Archbishop of Canterbury appointed 
by the Pope. Then Innocent III. absolved 
John's subjects from their allegiance to him, 
and handed his kingdom over to the King of 
France (1212 A.D.). When the terrified John 
came crouching before him, whether the 
Pope was or was not king of kings was no 
longer a question. But the papal power had 
reached its climax and the fourteenth cen- 
tury saw a rapid decline which there was no 
Gregory VII. nor Innocent III. to arrest. A 
long wrangle between Philip IV. of France 
and Pope Boniface VII., over the papal pre- 
rogatives, was terminated by the accession of 
a French archbishop to the chair of St. Peter, 
under the name of Clement V. Faithful to 
the cause of his sovereign, Clement removed 
the papal residence from Rome to Avignon, a 
town within the French borders, where seven 
popes successively lived and ruled directly 
under French influences. This in the annals 
of the Church is known as the ' ' Babylonian 
Captivity," a curious hiatus which lasted just 
seventy years (1309-79), and which cast a 
dark cloud over the Church for a century. 



150 



B3STOKY OP ITALY. 



Henry VII.. who had just succeeded to 
the throne of Germany (1311 a.d.). thought 
this a favorable time to go to Rome for his 
imperial crown. He could at the same time 
strengthen the bonis of amity with his Ital- 
ian kingdom, and also aid his Guelfic 
friends in trying to drive our the Ghibel- 
lines, who now bad possession in Florence. 
Befure the attack upon Florence the Emper- 
or suddenly and mysteriously died. The 
G-uelfs asserted that poison had been put 
into a cup of sacramental wine offered him 
after his coronation by the papal legate. 
However this may be. his death was the 
signal for hostilities fiercer than had ever be- 
fore existed, a frantic hatred driving Guelis 
and G-hibellines to the most extravagant ex- 
cesses. King Robert .1 Xaples also saw in 
the absence of the Pope and the prevailing 
disorder an opportunity to subjugate all of 
Italy to Angevine rule by using G-uelfs and 
GMbellines to destroy each other, thus fight- 
ing the nation with its own fires. But he 
was not strong enough for so ambitious a 
design. 

In the midst of this general anarchy, 
Rome had her own special type of disorder. 
Her government (so called) consisted of a 



HIST0EY OF ITALY. 151 

chief magistrate, or " senator," with powers 
similar to the podesta, and a council some- 
what like the ancient Senate. Guelfs and 
Grhibellines at Rome were neither for the 
Pope nor against him. They were for the 
Colonnas, or the Orsinis. The politics of the 
city revolved about the eternal strife exist- 
ing between these two noble families. Like 
all the great nobles in Rome, these families 
were descended from robber barons, some 
Scandinavian, some from the Rhine, some 
from Southern Italy. With no patrician 
blood, they were the apex of that pyramid 
which feudalism had planted upon Rome, 
and represented the system which it was the 
aim of the Guelfs to exterminate. 

Petrarch, who was admitted to the closest 
intimacy with the Colonnas, has made the 
world well acquainted with them, so we 
know what refinements, grace, and charm 
there were in the ladies of that princely 
house, and also what noble princely virtues 
existed in the men. But as they fought 
with the Orsinis for the grand prize, the sen- 
atorship, there was not a throb of patriotism, 
not a single thought of Rome or Romans 
in the breasts of these splendid mediaeval 
princes. So when the popes were exiled to 



152 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

Avignon, the city was given up to lawlessness. 
Scenes of violence and terror were of common 
occurrence upon the streets. Not a woman 
or a child was safe in the city at night, nor 
was anyone safe at any time outside the 
walls, where the Campagna was infested 
with robbers, and the Tiber with pirates. 

There was a youth growing up in Rome at 
this time, who was pondering upon these 
things. He was the son of an inn-keeper and 
of a washerwoman, but eager to know, and 
with keen intelligence he read, and read again 
the story of the ancient republic, its heroes, 
its triumphs, its noble ideals. This was 
Cola di Rienzi. Gradually there formed in 
his mind a dream, the dream of a rebirth of 
the splendid ancient Rome — which would be 
a new Rome with a soul, a Christian soul — 
which might again be mistress of the world ! 
He must first arouse the people to a sense of 
their degradation — then he would lead them 
to the great consummation. He — Cola di 
Rienzi — would be the liberator, and lift Rome 
from her degradation to a throne — higher 
than ever before, because it would be a Chris- 
tian throne. He had the gift of eloquence, 
and perhaps another mysterious gift which 
we now call personal magnetism. His enthu- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



153 



siasm, his intensity, the magic of his speech, 
gained listeners to his vague exalted dream 
about what he called the "good estate," 
when law and order should prevail, and all 
men have justice in a city which had taken 
her place again as mistress of the world. By 
painted allegories which he displayed upon 
the streets, and by juggling with the imagina- 
tions of the people, and by persistence and 
eloquent speech, he rose step by step, inspir- 
ing even the Pope with a belief in his ability 
to accomplish a miracle, and completely 
capturing the heart and the imagination of 
Petrarch. It seemed as if he were inspired, 
and as if his audacious plan developed by 
magic. Without a drop of blood, or a blow, 
the revolution was effected. The nobles, al- 
though angry and sullen, seemed awed by a 
mysterious force, and offered no resistance. 
A republic was proclaimed, with E-ienzi at its 
head, under the modest title of Tribune. 

The golden age seemed to have come. 
Every promise was fulfilled. The roads were 
cleared of highwaymen, and the river of 
pirates. Peace reigned in the city. Rienzi, 
robed in scarlet, sat in the Capitol, his pal- 
ace, and listened to complaints from high 
and low, dealing impartial justice to all. The 



154 HTSTOKY OF ITALY. 

Pope at Avignon was pleased, and the people 
at Rome seemed mad with joy, and believed 
the millennium was at hand. The news 
spread ov^er Europe and into Asia. The Great 
Potentate at Babylon, hearing that a man of 
wonderful justice had arisen in Rome, made 
supplication to Mahomet to protect Jerusa- 
lem from this new danger ! 

Dreamy visionary though he may have 
been, unbalanced though he certainly was, 
Rienzi had sent an electric thrill throughout 
the world. If only a kind fate could have 
taken him then ! The intoxication of power 
began to work and to manifest itself in more 
severity, more splendor, more confiscations 
of the treasures of the nobles to adorn his 
own palace. The great barons were now 
obliged to stand uncovered in his presence 
while he sat, and the people began to trem- 
ble before him. He devised strange fantas- 
tic ceremonies investing himself with higher 
and higher dignities, and finally with a sil- 
ver crown and sceptre, the nobles and the 
Pope's legate, still under his spell, assisting 
in the splendid pageant. The strange story 
of self -intoxication and extravagant preten- 
sion, in fantastic theatrical garb, begins to 
seem more like the libretto of a comic opera 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 155 

than sober history ; and yet all was taken 
seriously by the Pope, and by sovereigns in 
Europe. But his friends were alarmed. 
Petrarch, who had almost severed his inti- 
mate friendship with the Colonnas for his 
sake, no longer wrote him daily letters telling 
him he was greater than Romulus, greater 
than Brutus, or Camillus ! He solemnly 
warned him — entreated him to pause and to 
remember that he was ' ' not lord, but simply 
minister, of the republic." 

Rome was tranquil, but it was cowed, 
and beneath the adulation there was an 
undertone of anger. But Rienzi heard it 
not, and prepared for the climax. He an- 
nounced to the Italian cities that henceforth 
they would be governed from Rome alone, 
and he conferred Roman citizenship upon 
every native of Italy. This was a splendid 
dream of empire and of a united Italy, which 
was to be realized five centuries iater. But 
Rienzi' s dream was more than that : it was 
of an unlimited and impossible empire of 
which he in some mystic way was to be the 
head, not of Italy but of Christendom. The 
early nobility of his purpose had vanished. 
Instead of the "wise and clement," as he 
was once called, he was changing into a 



156 



HISTOBY OF ITALY. 



blood-thirsty tyrant who gloated over the 
dead bodies of two Colonnas slain in an 
affray with his troops. His treatment of the 
nobles became atrocious. The Pope was 
alarmed and angry, and deposed him. At 
the signs of a popular uprising, the fallen 
Tribune fled to the Apennines. Seven years 
later he made his peace with the Pope, who 
once more commissioned him to restore dis- 
tracted Rome to tranquillity. He put on the 
airs of an emperor, drank heavily, became 
gross and arrogant. As he sat in his palace 
one morning, flushed with wine, a strange 
sound reached his ears, the noise of a tumult 
below, then he heard the terrible words, 
"Death to the traitor, Rienzi ! " He at- 
tempted flight disguised as a shepherd, 
stained his face, mingled with the shouting 
crowd of people below, joining his voice with 
theirs in execration of himself. But the 
light flashed upon his jewelled bracelets 
which he had forgotten to remove. He was 
recognized, dragged to the great stair, and 
at the foot of the Lion where death sen- 
tences were usually read, was stabbed to 
death. 



CHAPTER V. 

That great region lying south of the Alps 
known as Lombardy was composed of an 
imposing group of principalities — Milan, 
Verona, Mantua, Padua, and the duchies of 
Ferrara and Modena. Milan, the most pow- 
erful of these, had for over a century been 
arbitrarily and mercilessly ruled by one fam- 
ily, the Yiscontis. The city of Milan, and 
also Verona, with no ambitions beyond the 
peninsula, were, like that other inland city of 
Florence, the opulent centres of trade and 
manufacture, their aims and policy entirely 
different from the two great cities lying 
south of them. 

Genoa and Venice had grown by foreign 
conquest ; were both majestic maritime pow- 
ers, both seeking the same markets by the 
same great highways. Both had factories 
skirting the entire circuit of the Black Sea, 
and both were bringing spices from Arabia, 
and precious merchandise from India, and 
grain and furs from Russia. Separated 



158 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 



from each other by the whole width of Italy, 
it was in the eastern waters that these rival 
cities fought their long battle of a half cen- 
tury, sometimes Yenice on her knees to 
Genoa, and sometimes Genoa supplicating 
Yenice for mercy. It was in the earlier 
days of this struggle that Marco Polo, upon 
returning from his twenty-five-year trip in 
Cathay, threw his fortune and himself into 
the contest with the Genoese, and after a 
calamitous defeat was carried with ship-loads 
of other prisoners to Genoa. One year spent 
in the Genoese dungeon gave to the world an 
epoch-making book. His marvellous stories 
would soon have faded from the memory of 
man, had not a fellow-prisoner pieced to- 
gether the wonder-tale as it was simply and 
unaffectedly told by the traveller, and thus 
produced the book which so profoundly af- 
fected the imaginations of men for centuries, 
and which lured Columbus into his audacious 
attempt to reach the great Kublai Khan by 
sailing into the West ! 

Yenice, as " Queen of the Adriatic, " 
claimed the right of exclusive navigation in 
that sea, her sovereignty being every year 
renewed and proclaimed by an imposing 
symbolic ceremony in which the Doge, rep- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 159 

resenting Venice, wedded the Adriatic with 
a ring. Genoa resisted this claim of exclu- 
sive ownership of the sea, and it was a proud 
moment for her in 1352 when she destroyed 
the Venetian fleet and the humbled Doge sent 
ambassadors to the Genoese admiral with a 
blank sheet of paper, begging him to dictate 
his own terms for peace. But the too-con- 
fident victor replied contemptuously, " You 
shall have no peace till we have bridled those 
horses of yours on the place of St. Mark." 
The Venetians gathered themselves for a 
supreme effort. The Genoese standard was 
already floating from the towers of Chioggia 
near Venice, with the Lion of St. Mark re- 
versed in token of defeat. Precious works 
of art, those spoils of Constantinople, were 
melted for the gold and silver. . The Vene- 
tian women gave their jewels, and the nobles 
their plate. After a long and brave struggle 
the Genoese fleet was at their mercy, and 
instead of " bridling the horses" at St. 
Mark's, Genoa fell to the position of a 
second-rate maritime power in Italy, from 
which she never again arose. In her con- 
sternation she appealed to Milan for protec- 
tion, and a Milanese governor took the 
humiliated city in charge. 



160 



HISTOBY OF ITALY. 



With Milan as an ally, the conflict with 
Venice was renewed, and the Venetian fleet 
destroyed. The great Visconti who was then 
lord of Milan, flushed with this triumph, be- 
gan to extend his mailed hand over the rest 
of the principalities, and was by 1385 master 
of Lorn bar dy. To escape this hard fate the 
Lombard states combined with Venice in an 
appeal to the German Emperor. So when 
the curtain again rises upon this troubled 
stage, we see one more source of devastation — 
Charles IV. with his soldiers tramping over 
the depleted and exhausted Italian states, 
and while on his way to Rome to receive his 
imperial crown, wearing that oft-transferred 
and rather mysterious symbol of power, the 
" Iron Crown of Lombardy ! " 

Out of the fratricidal strife Venice had 
emerged stronger than before, Milan had 
arisen with greatly augmented prestige, while 
Genoa had fallen from her great elevation to 
the rank of a second-rate power. Venice 
during the prolonged struggle had passed 
completely into the hands of her aristocracy. 
The people had already been excluded from 
her Grand Council. But the meshes were 
to be drawn still closer. From this body 
was selected a "Council of Ten" (1311 a.d.), 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 161 

a mysterious organization, the functions of 
which have never been fully understood. But 
with their methods the world is entirely fa- 
miliar. The secrecy of the trials, the absence 
of witnesses, the ignorance of the victims of 
the charges brought against them, has made 
the very name of this tribunal a synonym 
for mysterious horror and cruelty. Men and 
women occupying the highest positions would 
disappear to be heard of never more. And 
no one dared ask whither they had gone, or 
why ! Impartial as fate, it struck the power- 
ful as well as the weak. Indeed it seems to 
have been at first designed as a check upon 
ambitious and conspiring nobles, and then to 
have extended its scope indefinitely. But a 
succession of conspiracies for the overthrow 
of the government probably led to the crea- 
tion of this monstrous court of justice, so- 
called. 

The memory of one of the latest and most 
celebrated of these conspirators is still kept 
alive in the Ducal Palace at Venice, where 
among a series of portraits representing 
seventy-six Doges, one empty panel painted 
black bears this inscription: "This is the 
place of Marino Faliero, beheaded for his 
crimes (1335)." "Crime" is an ugly com- 



162 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

panion to a name in an epitaph ! But the 
meaning of the word is relative. The loftiest 
virtue in one land is sometimes crime in 
another. In Venice, in the fourteenth cen- 
tury, a revolt against the tyranny of the 
Council of Ten was treason and the blackest 
crime. TVhen Faliero, who had brilliantly 
served Venice in foreign lands all his life, 
was recalled from Avignon, where he was 
Ambassador at the Court of the Pope, to fill 
the office of Doge, and when the ducal cap, 
with its circlet of gold, was placed upon his 
head, and the ducal ring upon his finger, he 
believed he was receiving the crowning re- 
ward for a life-long devotion to the state. 
But when he found that he was a mere lay- 
figure in humiliating bondage to that secret 
tribunal, in the hands of younger men, and 
when he received taunts and slights and in- 
sult from those who should have trembled in 
his presence, his indignant fury seemed to 
turn his brain. An insane impulse seized him 
to overthrow the whole odious tyranny which 
was ruining his city. It ended as we have 
seen. The old man met his doom at the head 
of the stairs in the Ducal Palace, and there 
the empty panel has proclaimed his disgrace 
ever since. But it might be a grim satis- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 163 

faction to the proud old Venetian could lie 
know that, for that very reason, his name 
among the other seventy-six Doges is al- 
most the only one the world will never for- 
get ! One other, the name Foscari, has also 
attained a tragic immortality ; Francesco 
Foscari, after wearing the ducal cap for 
a number of years, was compelled by the 
Council of Ten to preside over -the torture of 
his only son. The obdurate tribunal refus- 
ing to receive his resignation, and insisting 
upon the unproved guilt of the young man, 
three times compelled him to sit in the tort- 
ure-chamber and see his adored son broken 
to pieces upon the rack. All this he hero- 
ically bore. But when the Council tried to 
disgrace him by taking the ducal ring from 
his finger and breaking it in pieces, and then 
drove him from the Palace, the old man's 
heart broke, and he died as the bells were 
ringing in his successor (1425). Then they 
bore him back to the Palace from which they 
had just expelled him, placed the ducal cap 
again on his dead brow, gave him the most 
magnificent funeral the Republic could be- 
stow, and covered him with sculptured mar- 
ble in the Church of the Frari, where he still 
lies. 



164 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



The city of Milan, already populous and 
powerful, was now taking on a new splendor 
which would make her forever great in the 
architectural world. Her matchless cathe- 
dral, with its wilderness of statues, was in 
process of erection. Cimabue and Giotto 
and their followers had for almost a century 
been making Florence beautiful, and laying 
the foundations of the Italian school of 
painting. Those delicate flowers, poesy and 
art. with their strange tendency to adorn 
rough and unlovely places with their tender 
grace 3 were beginning to weave a filmy deli- 
cate mantle over Italy. While that awful 
pestilence, the " Black Death." was stalking 
over the land, Boccaccio wrote his •'Decam- 
eron,'' and was reciting its hundred stories for 
the diversion of panic-stricken Florentines 
(1347 a.d.). And in the midst of distracting 
political agitations, with the earth perpetu- 
ally trembling beneath his feet in Rome and 
in Florence (1304-74), Petrarch, proudly 
wearing the laureate's crown, was writing 
sonnets and striving to create a new intel- 
lectual life by infusing into the people his 
own passionate ardor for the literature of 
past ages, and was thus sowing the first 
seeds for a coming Renaissance. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



165 



The prolonged absence from Rome had 
greatly impaired the dignity and the authority 
of the Church, but in spite of protests and 
entreaties the popes still lingered in France. 
Its remoteness from the perpetual agitations 
at Rome, its luxurious repose and isolation, 
made Avignon a fascinating abode to the car- 
dinals, who resisted all attempts to re-estab- 
lish the papal residence in the Eternal City. 
But in 1367, Pope Gregory XL, moved by the 
prayers of a saintly woman, St. Catharine of 
Siena, went to Rome and survived the change 
just one year. There then commenced a dis- 
graceful quarrel between popes and cardinals 
which lasted for half a century. The cardi- 
nals, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, 
had placed Urban VI. in the vacant chair at 
Rome. But when they discovered that he 
was arrogant, domineering, and intractable, 
and perhaps — that he would not return to 
Avignon — they also discovered that the 
Holy Spirit had this time made a mistake. 
They repudiated him and elected another — 
Clement VII. So now there were two in- 
fallible popes, one at Rome and another at 
Avignon, each claiming universal dominion 
by virtue of his being the one and only vice- 
gerent of Christ upon earth ! While the air 



166 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



was vibrating with anathemas and excom- 
munications hurled from Rome to Avignon, 
and from Avignon back again to Home, a 
church council was called which took upon 
itself the settlement of the dispute by de- 
posing both popes, and electing another 
under the title of Alexander V. So now 
there were three infallible and only vicars 
of Christ reigning over His kingdom upon 
earth, and Europe was divided in allegiance, 
its conscience confused, and its religious 
enthusiasm chilled. This is known as " the 
great Schism of the West." Not until the 
fifteenth century was the disgraceful breach 
healed, when, at the church council at Con- 
stance in 1414, all three popes were formally 
deposed and Martin V., a prince of the great 
house of Colonna, was solemnly placed in 
the papal chair at Rome. 

The important point established by the 
action of this council was, not that Martin 
V. was the rightful Pope, but that the su- 
preme ecclesiastical power was vested in the 
council ; and that the decisions of a collective 
episcopate, composed of prelates from all the 
Catholic states of Europe, was the court of 
last appeal to which even popes must bow ; 
a limitation of papal prerogative which would 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 107 

have been startling to Gregory VII., or to 
Innocent III. when he was deposing kings 
in England and in France, and claiming an 
authoritjr with no visible frontier. But this 
was only a spasmodic reform, as later events 
showed. 

In the south of Italy at this time a young 
queen was on the throne of Naples, whose 
troubled life-story bears some curious points 
of resemblance to that of Mary Queen of 
Scots two hundred years later. While only 
a child of sixteen, she was a queen, and al- 
ready married to her cousin, who was mak- 
ing himself odious by insisting that he should 
share her authority. This troublesome con- 
sort was one day invited into an upper cham- 
ber, a silken noose was deftly thrown about 
his neck, and he was pushed out of the 
window. Then, before the clamor over his 
murder had died away, the beautiful Joanna 
was wedded to the man believed to be the 
chief instigator of the plot. Interest in this 
romance is enhanced by the knowledge that 
Boccaccio was one of the fascinating Queen's 
many adorers, and warmly championed her 
during her stormy career, which was tragi- 
cally ended in 1382, by her being smothered 
by pillows in her bed. 



168 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

As the fourteenth century was closing, the 
popes were ruling at Rome. In the south 
the Angevines were holding a luxurious and 
voluptuous court at Naples, and the Ar- 
ragonese were reigning in Sicily. In the 
north, Milan was grasping all within her 
reach, and Florence beginning * to tremble 
before her, she herself being engaged the 
while in humbling beautiful and brave Pisa. 
Genoa' s star was declining, while Venice sat 
triumphant upon her throne on the shining 
Adriatic. 

There had been wars, and desolation, and 
pestilence, and tumultuous changes at every 
point — no rest, no repose. And yet a country 
which in one century had been given a Dante, 
a Giotto, a Petrarch, and a Boccaccio, had 
not been entirely forgotten by the gods ! 



CHAPTER VI. 

In this story of Italy a name destined more 
than any other to shape her ultimate future 
has not yet been heard. Lying in the sun 
under the shadow of the Alps, and back from 
the sea in safe, noiseless obscurity, was the 
little province of Savoy. Possessing nothing 
that others wanted, and with no extravagant 
outreaching desires of its own, this bit of ter- 
ritory had been quietly expanding since the 
beginning of the eleventh century, when a cer- 
tain Humbert, a German count, obtained it as 
a gift from the Duke of Burgundy. By judi- 
cious marriages, and by gradual encroach- 
ments upon his neighbors, the tract had ex- 
panded into quite a large state, and in 1388 the 
province of Nice, lying between it and the 
sea, needing protection from French encroach- 
ments, voluntarily annexed herself to her 
sturdy mountaineer neighbor in the north, 
and so to the realm of mountains, and forest, 
and ravines, was now added a much-needed 



170 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

line of seacoast. The state of Savoy had thus 
at once become important, and a factor in 
the affairs of the peninsula. So in the year 
1413 the Emperor Sigismund dignified the 
territory with the name of duchy, and Count 
Amadeus VIII., the descendant of the first 
Humbert, became Duke of Savoy, the new 
duchy of course becoming a fief of the em- 
pire. Duke Amadeus, realizing the peril of 
his position in being so near to the grasping 
Duke of Milan, at once formed an alliance 
with Florence and Venice which was mutu- 
ally advantageous, and from this time the 
dukes of Savoy, the "janitors of the Alps," 
as they have been called, appear, disappear, 
and reappear again with telling effect in 
the story of Italy. Upon the deposition of 
Eugenius IV., Duke Amadeus was offered 
the papal chair with the title Felix V. He 
abdicated his dukedom in favor of his son 
and reigned over the pontificate for a brief 
period, then prudently resigned in favor of 
a more popular candidate. In proof of the 
high esteem in which he was held, he was 
always thereafter permitted to wear a part 
of the pontifical dress, and had the special 
privilege of giving the Pope a fraternal kiss 
upon the cheek, instead of kissing his toe. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



171 



All of which is interesting as evidence of the 
ability and adroitness which distinguished 
the first Duke of Savoy, and also showing 
the brilliant debut which the new duchy 
made into the great world. 

During the last century another compli- 
cating network of circumstances had been 
spun over Italy. Bands of adventurers had 
swarmed into the peninsula from other 
lands, offering to fight the battles of anyone 
who would pay for their service. Known as 
free lances in other countries, these in Italy 
were called condottieri. What had at first 
been a disorderly vagrant host, plundering 
right and left, had now become a regularly 
organized system of mercenaries. Wars were 
incessant, and were an interruption to in- 
dustry and hence to prosperity, something 
dearer than aught else to the Italian cities. 
By employing the condottieri, the merchant 
princes in Florence, and Venice, and Milan, 
need have no conscription arresting peaceful 
pursuits, and might still go on piling up 
riches, while their paid servants fought their 
battles. The story of Carmagnola shows to 
what heights these soldiers of fortune might 
climb, and to what depths they might also 
fall. A rustic from the mountains of Pied- 



172 HISTOHY OF ITALY. 

mont, Carmagnola, while only a boy, joined 
the condottieri. His genius for military 
affairs advanced him rapidly, and early in 
the fifteenth century he was the commander- 
in-chief of the Milanese army. When the 
stern old conquering Duke Gian Galeazzo 
died, and the smaller Lombard cities, Parma, 
Cremona, Lodi, Piacenza, struggled out of 
the grasp of his son Philip, he it was who 
brought them back into subjection and made 
Milan stronger than before. So now the 
Piedmontese peasant was a great general, 
and the terror of Florentines and Venetians, 
and of all the enemies of Milan. For his re- 
ward he was given a Vis con ti for his bride, 
and dwelt in a palace, and was treated as a 
prince. This awoke envy, and ways of un- 
dermining him were discovered. The Duke's 
attitude toward him suddenly changed. His 
feelings wounded, stung to madness by a 
sense of ingratitude, in a sudden access of 
rage Carmagnola turned his back upon 
Milan and rode across the frontier into 
Savoy. There he offered his services to 
Duke Amadeus, his native prince, suggest- 
ing ways in which he could extend his fron- 
tier on the side toward Milan ! 
But the Duke was too prudent to accept 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 173 

tlie opportunity, and Carmagnola then pre- 
sented himself before the Senate in Venice 
with a similar offer. Who so well as he 
knew the strength and the weakness of their 
terrible enemy, Milan? Nothing better 
could have come to Venice at this time while 
in league with Florence and Savoy against 
the terrible power in the north. She hated 
Florence only a little less than Milan, and 
would not have been displeased to leave her 
to her fate. So the great condottiere was 
invested with absolute authority and lived 
again in a palace and like a prince, basking 
in the friendship of the Doge, Francesco 
Foscari, he also not yet under the shadow of 
tragedy ! And there were many victories, 
and Duke Philip of Milan saw his armies de- 
stroyed by the general whose strategy and 
invincibility he so well knew. But the time 
came when in a struggle over Cremona there 
was a crushing defeat for the Venetians, 
Carmagnola said because his advice had not 
been followed. There were no reproaches. 
Carmagnola, on the contrary, was assured 
by the Senate of their continued confidence 
— might he not some day ride back to Milan 
in the same way he had come to them ? A 
flattering invitation came for him to return 



174 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

to Venice for a conference with the "Most 
Serene Prince and the illustrions Senators." 
When he arrived he was conducted by his 
courtier-attendants directly to the Doge's 
Palace. He was led through a labyrinth of 
halls, growing dimmer and dimmer, until 
a door was opened and he realized his fate — 
he was in a dungeon. The fatal doors were 
only to open again as he passed from day to 
day to the torture-chamber, where in the 
presence of the Secret Council it was expect- 
ed to wring from him a confession of having 
betrayed them at Cremona to the Duke of 
Milan. "Whether the month of torture ac- 
complished this, no one knew. It is only 
known that on May 5, 1432, the great chief 
was led out. with his mouth gagged, to his 
execution on the plaza. In this way was 
justice administered in beautiful Venice ! 
Perhaps when the aged and stricken Doge 
was witnessing his own son's tortures, not 
long after, he may have recalled Carmagnola 
and the "torture-chamber,'' and the last 
scene "between the columns." 

But the defeat at Cremona so fatal to 
Carmagnola made the fortune of another 
great condottiere. Francesco Sforza's star 
steadily rose after that day in 1431, when 



HISTOUY OF ITALY. 175 

lie was the victorious general in com- 
mand of the Milanese army, and when Duke 
Philip died without an heir and there was 
no Visconti to succeed him, the brilliant 
soldier of fortune, as commander-in-chief, 
controlled the situation. By finesse and by 
audacity he seized the vacant throne and 
planted the dynasty of the Sforzas (1450). 
This usurper, who ruled wisely for those 
times, was the grandson of a peasant, but 
claimed descent from a person no less dis- 
tinguished than Porsenna, King of Etruria, 
the champion of the exiled King Tarquin ! 
The genius for statecraft and the soaring 
ambition of this man prepared the way for 
the line of dukes which was to follow him. 
They had not the wolf -like qualities of the 
Yiscontis, did not find entertainment in 
hunting their peasants with bloodhounds, 
but with more refined methods, while a little 
less cruel, proved more dangerous to Italy. 



CHAPTER VII. 

In Florence a new family had come into 
control of the Republic. The name "dei 
Medici" indicates that their ancestors had 
been members of one of the ancient city 
guilds — not necessarily as practising the pro- 
fession of medicine, but as a qualification 
for participating in the government. By 
mercantile pursuits this family had amassed 
great wealth, and by lavish liberality and 
integrity and by intelligence had acquired 
popularity and influence. Cosimo de' Medici 
(1389-1404 a.d.), the son of a long line of mer- 
chants, by his talent for administration and 
his affability, and by his princely generosity, 
had attained the position of an untitled 
prince. His power became almost supreme. 
Whom he would he raised, and whom he 
would he abased. Of course the ruling oligar- 
chy was jealous and tried to destroy him. He 
was accused, it mattered little of what, ban- 
ished, and then recalled triumphant, because 



HISTOKY OF ITALY. 



177 



they could not get along without his sus- 
taining and guiding hand, which kept the 
people in the path of peace, prosperity and 
wealth. He gathered about him great ar- 
tists, commissioned Brunelleschi to complete 
the plans for the Duomo, and employed 
Ghiberti, Donatello and Luca della Robbia 
to adorn buildings with their matchless 
sculptures. In this founder of the house of 
Medici, we see all the traits which so dis- 
tinguished this epoch-making family, — the 
passion for learning and for art and for all 
that makes for supreme culture and intel- 
lectual refinement, and joined to this that 
subtle quality which made him the despotic 
master of the people without their knowing 
it. The friend of the democracy and its 
munificent benefactor, what more could they 
ask % Holding no office, no title, he left to 
his descendants a legacy of power, a firm 
grasp upon the state which it would not find 
easy to shake off. 

In 1453 an event of transcendent impor- 
tance occurred. The capture of Constanti- 
nople by the Turks thrilled Europe with a 
tide of new intellectual life. Greek scholars 
and Greek literature carried into every land 
the thought and the ideals of the great past. 



178 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

The Turks in freeing these hoarded treasures 
were the unconscious benefactors of Europe, 
and Christendom while weeping for Constan- 
tinople was just as unconsciously enriched 
by its loss ! But for Italy a Renaissance had 
been in progress for a century. A passion 
for ancient Greek manuscripts, and for Greek 
culture and ideals, was not new ; it had ex- 
isted since Petrarch taught the Colonnas the 
subtle charm of these things. And Florence 
was already instinct with the spirit of the 
Renaissance when its transforming tide swept 
over the rest of Europe. So. as was natural, 
it was the Florentines who were the most 
influential in guiding this new impulse, and 
it was the Medicean family which stood at 
the gateway between the old and the new 
culture. 

It was Lorenzo de* Medici, the grandson of 
Cosimo, who gave the final impress to the 
character of the Medicean policy. Florence 
was to be a personal despotism, and he, 
its magnificent ruler and patron. His own 
for run- was great, but not great enough to 
carry out his princely designs, so he drew 
upon the public treasury. Here was an 
opportunity for his downfall, which was 
ear-fully planned by the Pope and a family 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 179 

of jealous Florentine nobles — the Pazzis. 
By a preconcerted plot lie and his brother, 
while at high mass in the Duomo, were 
attacked by assassins. His brother was 
slain, but Lorenzo survived to witness the 
effacement of the Pazzi family by the en- 
raged Florentines, and his own exaltation 
far beyond what it had been before the 
conspiracy. A hideous fringe of dead con- 
spirators hung from the windows of the 
Signoria, an archbishop and two priests were 
among the slain, and the people were not ap- 
peased until the last of the enemies of their 
benefactor had been slaughtered. Pope 
Sixtus IV. enlisted the King of Naples to 
aid in avenging the death of his archbishop. 
But the persuasive and wily Lorenzo went 
himself to Naples and in one interview in- 
duced the King to abandon his purpose, cun- 
ningly showing him how much more advan- 
tageous would be the friendship of Florence 
than her enmity. Then, this diplomatic 
triumph accomplished, Lorenzo returned to 
bury out of sight the liberties of the republic 
by converting the elective body of the state 
into a permanent council appointed by him- 
self. It was a delightful enslavement. Their 
city, like a second Athens, was growing 



180 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 



splendid and drawing to itself the learning 
and culture and art of all Italy. It had 
Michel Angelo, the greatest genius that ever 
wrought in marble, to sculpture its monu- 
ments and to adorn its walls, and Ghirlandajo 
and Ghiberti and della Robbia to embellish 
its palaces. The age of Pericles had come 
again. They still exulted in the name of Re- 
public, and so lightly did their chains rest 
upon them, that they believed they were 
free ! 

But beneath these splendid refinements, 
and the scholarship and the fastidious taste 
and breeding, there was a morass of wicked- 
ness. Religion and morality, as we under- 
stand them, did not exist, nor did nobility 
of character, nor truth, nor honor, nor even 
decency in the conduct of life. Yet Florence, 
selfish, sordid, sensual, was chosen for the 
strangest outpouring of genius that, with a 
single exception, ever came to one city. Bru- 
nelleschi, Ghiberti, Ghirlandajo, Angelico, 
Robbia, Leonardo, Raphael and Michel 
Angelo, — such is a partial list of the names 
enrolled in one century — a century of incred- 
ible corruption and a climax in the moral 
degradation of Italy ! 

What are we to think of the magnificent 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 181 

patron of a new culture who writes ribald 
songs and choruses for the people to sing 
upon the streets ? and what of the people 
who take pleasure in these things? One 
asks in bewilderment whether the putrid ele- 
ments of decomposing character are what 
genius feeds upon ! And whether it be true 
that art and spiritual elevation are antago- 
nistic, and that art and morals must dwell in 
different realms ! However this may be, 
Florence under Lorenzo " the Magnificent " 
reached the sublimest heights in art, and a 
perfection of aesthetic development which 
was to be a model for the world — and yet 
she was base ! 

Italy's moral condition at this time is like 
the negative of a photograph. It precisely 
reverses the standards of to-day. It makes 
high-lights of shadows, and shadows of high- 
lights. What they called virtuous we consider 
infamous. What to us is essential to decency 
of character, to them would have been com- 
promising, and even fatal to social or political 
reputation. The standing of a man was not 
injured by his being considered vicious or 
perfidious, but nothing could be worse than a 
reputation for simplicity ! One might lie and 
use fraud and deception, but to be incapable, 



182 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

or to sin against taste — these were crimes for 
which no genius would atone. 

In the evolution of the Italian republics 
not one elevating influence had been at 
work. Intensely narrow in their patriotism, 
the well-being of each state demanded the 
destruction of the rest. The prosperity of 
Florence required that she should sap the 
life of Pisa, and that of Yenice, that she 
should destroy her competitor Genoa, and 
Milan, that she should devour all within her 
reach. A policy so debasing to national 
character would have extinguished native 
nobility had it existed. Instead of wisely 
drawing together for mutual protection and 
advantage, they were always driven apart by 
fierce antagonisms. Italy was in fact a dis- 
integrated mass held together by perfectly 
artificial systems needing only a touch from 
a more firmly compacted body to fall into 
ruin. She was not an organism, but an 
ingenious mechanism. Nothing had devel- 
oped from a life principle within ; all was 
artificially imposed from without, and was 
held together by that vicious combination 
of fraud, violence,- and subtle wickedness, 
called statecraft. 

The source of the poison which was cours- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



183 



ing in the veins of Italy was the Papal King- 
dom. When an open profligate could buy 
the suffrages of the cardinals and become 
the primate of Christendom, and when he 
could publicly acknowledge his illegitimate 
sons and daughters, could set his price upon 
sin, and then for his own enrichment estab- 
lish an organized system for the sale of 
pardons, how could virtue exist in the land ? 
This is what Innocent III. was doing, his 
traffic in crime having, it is said, filled 
the Campagna with brigands and assassins. 
Religion, instead of a renovating, purifying, 
spiritual influence, had become simply a sys- 
tem by which men might placate a wrathful 
Gfod by gifts, and if these were frequent and 
rich enough, they might sin to the bent of 
their desires. It was for revolt against such 
a church as this that the Inquisition was 
torturing and burning heretics, and that 
John Huss and Jerome of Prague had suf- 
fered martyrdom, and that the Waldenses 
were to be slaughtered like sheep in the 
shambles ! 

But good breeding and taste demanded 
that the Church be sustained, and nowhere 
in Italy was the martyr's crown in great 
request ! The mental energies of Italy were 



184 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

fully occupied with the Renaissance. Flor- 
ence had a great work in hand. She was 
laying the foundations of modern cul- 
ture. It would be too much to expect 
that she should at the same time be con- 
ducting a spiritual reformation. She had 
her own mission, and was performing it with 
supreme excellence, and if under the des- 
potic sway of Lorenzo, that magnificent 
pagan, she was being emancipated some- 
what from the Church which had excom- 
municated her on his account, we are com- 
pelled to think that paganism was not a 
bad exchange for a religion which had be- 
come so depraved and so debasing to the 
conscience of its children. But the truth 
pure and nndefiled still existed ; not in the 
hierarchy, not at Rome, but in the deep re- 
cesses of human hearts. In Italy and every- 
where were men and women in whose souls 
the sacred flame was burning with undimin- 
ished ardor, and untarnished purity, and 
this it was which brought the living waters 
safely through the centuries, and through the 
unspeakable defilements of ecclesiasticism. 

There was one such soul now in Italy 
struggling with the problem of sin. Savon- 
arola, a Dominican friar born in Ferrara, had 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



185 



from his childhood been oppressed with a 
sense of the sinfulness of Italy. Sent to preach 
to the Florentines, he found their city given 
up to sensual pleasures. Under the influence 
of its splendid tyrant, the worship of beauty 
and of pagan culture was its religion. He 
tried to tell them of their peril, but it was the 
voice of one crying in the wilderness. It was 
Lorenzo de' Medici, the man who had taken 
away their liberties, he it was who had thus 
perverted their hearts with paganism! If Flor- 
ence was to be saved he must be destroyed. 
A warning voice within gave him no peace ; 
night and day it said, ' ' Cry aloud and spare 
not." He seemed to be taken possession of 
by something not of himself, and the spirit 
of prophecy came upon him. He saw a for- 
eign host sweeping through the land, Italy 
ravaged, and blood flowing in the streets of 
Florence, and then a purified Church rising 
over a penitent and stricken Italy. In 
visions and in trances again and again he 
saw these things. He must tell the people 
of their coming doom. " Repent — repent — 
while there is yet time!" That was the 
burden of his cry. Crowds began to throng 
the Duomo to catch the rushing torrent of 
his words. He laid bare the wickedness of 



1S6 



HIST0EY OF ITALY. 



their hearts and the iniquity of their lives 
with such an unsparing hand that men 
trembled and women cried aloud in terror. 
A scribe who preserved portions of these ser- 
mons breaks off in his narrative wirh these 
words. "Here I was so overcome wirh weep- 
ing that I could not go on." Another one 
says, "His words caused such terror, alarm, 
sobbing and tears that everyone passed out 
into the streets without speaking, more dead 
than alive." 

Lorenzo, wishing the best of everything 
for Florence, was pleased to have the great 
preacher remain. Perhaps it touched his 
aesthetic sense to listen to his strange in- 
spired eloquence, like a prophet of old, and 
to watch that austere, haggard face, with the 
deep-set eyes, burning and flashing from 
beneath his cowl. But when the darts be- 
gan to strike him. when the preacher would 
not meet him. because he was the enemy of 
Florence, then his feelings changed. Per- 
fectly antagonistic, these men represented 
hostile principles. But the paganism of 
which Lorenzo was the incarnation, was 
quite as much a revolt against a corrupt 
church as was Savonarola's drearn of a new 
spiritual baptism, and it was intended in 



HIST0BY OF ITALY. 187 

the evolutionary process to accomplish the 
spiritual resurrection he sought, not by 
methods such as the impassioned reformer 
would have chosen, but by the emancipa- 
tion of human thought from the tram- 
mels he venerated and upheld. The great 
preacher, inspired seer though he was, did 
not understand the solution of the problem. 
The Renaissance was a necessary highway 
in human progress which led directly to 
Luther. 

Still another mind different in quality from 
both of these was in Florence at this time, 
forecasting the future,- and pointing out the 
path of safety. Righteousness was not 
upon his banner, nor did he call upon people 
to " repent." This was Machiavelli, states- 
man, cynic, and philosopher. His acute 
mind grasped the idea of unity as the hope 
of Italy, and also clearly traced the corrup- 
tion and prevailing disunion to the Church 
as its source. The Church must be held sub- 
ordinate in the state, rivalries and antago- 
nisms must cease, and all must come under 
one prince — that prince to be Lorenzo de' 
Medici. Such was the plan outlined in his 
famous work "The Prince" — the most saga- 
cious and at the same time the most auda- 



1SS HISTOFcY OF ITALY. 

cious and infamous book ever given to the 
world. Dedicated to Lorenzo, it is intended 
as a hand-book for princes — showing how to 
acquire power, and how to keep it. It meas- 
ures with scientific accuracy the amount of 
cruelty needed under different conditions 
to make a city helpless. In speaking of free 
cities, in view of the troublesome vitality in 
the idea of liberty, he says — ,; to speak the 
truth, the only safe way. is to ruin them." 
Men may sometimes be managed by caress- 
ing : if not. they should "be trampled out." 
He sneers at Baglioni, because he had not 
the courage to strangle his guest. Julius II., 
after dinner. The only despicable quality is 
weakness. So with refreshing frankness he 
proceeds to lay bare Italian political methods. 
Everyone knew that such were the means 
used by the Venetian Council, and the Papal 
Court, and the Sforzas, but that it should be 
calmly and philosophically stated, that du- 
plicity and fraud and cold-blooded cruelty 
were the proper path to power, and the 
essential weapons after it was acquired — this 
it is which has astonished the world for five 
centuries! The corrupting influence of "The 
Prince " upon France and Spain at the time is 
undoubted, and we are not surprised to hear 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 189 

that the Spanish princes and the sons of 
Catharine de' Medici were at a later period 
careful students of this manual of political 
crime. Machiavelli' s strictures upon the 
Church sound like Satan reproving sin. 
But while he must have admired the Christian 
hierarchy as the finest specimen of his art, 
yet viewed in its relation to the political con- 
dition of Italy, he disapproved of it, because 
he had the wisdom to see that the hope of 
Italy lay in making the Church subordinate 
to a central authority. Savonarola, on the 
other hand, thinking only of righteousness 
and attacking the sins of the Pope as fiercely 
as those of the people, would have thought it 
impious to impair the authority of the Ghurch, 
or alter its structure one iota. 

The day came when Lorenzo needed the 
preacher. He was dying, and sent to Savon- 
arola to come and open the door of Heaven 
for him by the sacraments of the Church, 
and by absolution. He would have none 
but the Dominican, for none other was 
honest. The friar, standing by the dying 
man, required three things as the condition 
for absolving him. He must throw himself 
upon God's mercy, which he was willing to 
do ; must restore all property unjustly ac- 



190 HISTOKY OF ITALY. 

quired, to which he also consented ; and 
he nmst give Florence back her liberty ! 
The friar had asked too much of the dying 
sinner with only minutes to live. He silently 
turned his face to the wall, and died un- 
shriven. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

The year of Lorenzo's death, 1492, was 
great in the world' s chronology. It witnessed 
the expulsion of the Moors from Granada, 
and the final triumph of Spain after her 
struggle of 700 years. It saw the European 
states, every one, held under the dominion 
of a strong centralized authority which had 
forever effaced feudalism. But greater than 
all else, another world was revealed, be- 
yond the mysterious Western Ocean. The 
full significance of this was not suspected ; 
but Queen Isabella's gold, and kindness, and 
proselyting spirit had forged the most im- 
portant link in the chain of circumstances 
since the birth of Christ. Then, as always, 
however, the emphasis was placedupon events 
which would become invisible through the 
perspective of centuries. The death of Lo- 
renzo and of the reigning Pope seemed vastly 
more important than the discovery made by 
the Genoese. Who would wear the tiara, 



192 



HISTOET OF ITALY. 



was the all-absorbing question. It was a 
great opportunity for the cardinals. They 
had bought their red hats with gold, and 
now might get the price back by selling their 
suffrages ■! Roderigo Borgia, from Valencia, 
Spain, was the richest, wisest, and most cun- 
ning of the candidates. He knew the price 
of every one of the conclave : that Cardinal 
Sforza, brother of the Duke of Milan, wanted 
to be Vice Chancellor ; that Cardinal Orsini 
had long had his eye upon the Borgia 
palaces in Rome ; that while Cardinal Co- 
lonna preferred the Abbey of Subiaco with 
its fortresses, another thirsted for the Bishop- 
ric of Porto, with its palace and well-stocked 
wine-cellars ; others again being satisfied 
with gold. And so it was that in 1492 the 
mantle of St. Peter was placed upon Roderigo 
Borgia, who assumed the title Alexander VI. 
The reign of Nero among the emperors was 
not a greater climax than this first Borgia's 
among the popes. No less sensual, no less 
grasping of power than Nero, he claimed an 
unlimited authority — which even included 
the hemisphere just discovered by Columbus, 
which he generously divided between Spain 
and Portugal — and also just as unlimited in- 
dulgence in his own private and personal life. 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 193 

His hand was strong, and guided by craft 
and sagacity. So his first work was to hum- 
ble the great princes — and to destroy the 
faction between Colonnas and Orsinis. So 
active was the sale of indulgences and par- 
dons that an epigram then current says : 
"Alexander sells the keys, the altars, and 
Christ. Well — he bought them, so has he not 
the right to sell them !" But if he gave a 
heavy price for his tiara, he cunningly got it 
back in creating forty-three new cardinals, 
each of whom paid him a fortune for his hat ! 
Twelve of these, it is said, were sold at auction 
in one day. 

The one man he could not buy was Savon- 
arola. He tried it with honeyed words and 
blandishments, offering him a cardinal's hat 
if he would come to Rome. But the friar 
replied that he preferred the red crown of 
martyrdom. A crusade against sin was not 
pleasant to a pope steeped in crime and prof- 
ligacy, who was showering benefits upon his 
illegitimate children, making Cesar Borgia 
at eighteen a cardinal, and contracting a 
royal alliance for his daughter Lucrezia. He 
could easily have silenced the voice of the 
preacher at Rome, but as the friar would 
not walk into his trap, he suspended him. 



194 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

Savonaro±a had struck a new note in his in- 
spired declamation. He was the champion of 
liberty. Political freedom was inseparable 
from righteousness, and, like Ezekiel and 
Jeremiah and Jonah and all the prophets of 
old, he believed it was his mission to over- 
throw tyranny and to destroy wicked rulers 
and constitutions. So, without ceasing, he 
incited the people to cast off the rule of the 
Medici, which had descended to Piero, the 
feeble son of Lorenzo. 

Ludovico Sforza for his own purposes 
invited Charles VIII. , King of France, to 
invade Italy with the purpose of establish- 
ing a shadowy claim upon Naples, offering 
the assistance of Lombardy in the enter- 
prise. And in 1494 Savonarola's prophecy 
was fulfilled. A French army entering 
by the territories of the Duke of Milan, 
marched southward, and achieved a blood- 
less triumph over Italy. Florence and 
Rome, without resistance, were handed over 
to him by Piero de' Medici and Alexander 
VI. After proclaiming himself King of 
Naples, Charles returned to France, and 
Italy, except for the humiliation, and the 
discovery of her weakness by Europe, re- 
mained much as before. 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 195 

Savonarola' s words had been verified ! 
The excited Florentines believing he alone 
could save them, he became practically a 
dictator. Piero and -his house were driven 
out, and the preacher planned a new consti- 
tution for a new Florence. A spiritual 
madness seized the people. Instead of vile 
songs, hymns were sung upon the streets, 
and young and old pledged themselves to 
lives of piety and austerity. A day was 
appointed for the "burning of vanities," 
when there was a great holocaust of finery 
and adornments and books ; Boccaccio, and 
the classic poets, and MSS., and rare paint- 
ings were given to the flames. It was a 
revival — the greatest the world ever saw. It 
was Puritanism run mad in Florence ! This 
was the climax. The burning of works of 
art, the insult to the new culture, roused the 
fury of its adherents. They joined hands 
with the Pope to destroy this prophet of 
evil who was holding Florence in his hand. 
A reaction from the tense emotional strain 
also came, and when the city was under an 
interdict by the Pope, and no sacraments 
could be administered for the living or rites 
for the dead, some of Savonarola' s followers 
fell away from him. The ordeal by fire was 



196 HISTOKY OF ITALY. 

proposed to learn whether or no he really 
was of God, as he claimed. The furnace was 
prepared, the Franciscan who had offered 
to join him in the test was ready, and the 
people assembled to witness a miracle. But 
Savonarola did not come — and at last a 
heavy rain extinguished the fires. The faith 
of the people was shaken, and a prison (in 
the tower of the Signoria Palace) closed 
upon the fallen dictator. There are vague 
rumors of prolonged tortures, and of con- 
fessions and retractions shrieked by him 
while in the delirium of the rack. How 
much is true no one knows — only that on the 
23d of May, 1898, he came before the peo- 
ple for the last time. As the fires were 
lighted beneath him, and the noose adjust- 
ed about his neck, a jeering voice cried, 
" Prophet — now is the time for a miracle ! " 
The only words he uttered were, "The Lord 
has suffered as much for me," — and the 
rope and the fire did their work. 

The French invasion by Charles, barren of 
immediate results, was the showy prelude 
to the real performance. It was the noisy, 
harmless shower preceding the deluge. Eu- 
rope had found out that Italy was an easy 
prey for any adventurous kingdom. But 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 197 

there was a still deeper cause for the over- 
turnings which were at hand. In the path of 
progress Europe had moved from the rule 
of many masters into the strong keeping of 
four or five. Feudalism was dead. Diver- 
sity had had its day and accomplished its 
work, and the hour had struck for unity. 
Europe contained a group of firmly com- 
pacted absolutisms, each despotically gov- 
erned by a central authority, and all bound 
together again into a larger unity by diplo- 
matic threads. What was done by Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella in Spain, thrilled the 
Court of Maximilian at Vienna ; every move 
of England and France in like manner vi- 
brated through the entire group of despot- 
isms. A tide bearing the principle of unity, 
had moved over the face of Europe, even 
Russia, remote and separated, keeping step 
with the general advance. Italy alone was 
left behind, and in a Europe ruled by kings 
and parliaments there lingered five mediaeval 
states, with dukes and doges, and gonfalo- 
niers, and signorias, and grand councils, all 
crowded together in a small area, upon a small 
peninsula. Engaged in deadly rivalry with 
one another, they were playing an antiquated 
game upon an absurdly small field. They 



198 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

were an anachronism in Europe. That the 
wave should sweep over them was just as 
inevitable as that the tide should cover a 
low-lying strip of land. It might be as 
surely prophesied as that the sun should 
rise after the dawn. The intellectual awa- 
kening of the Renaissance, so hateful to 
Savonarola, was the first streak of light in 
the dawn of the new day — a day which 
would reach its high noon when not alone 
the intellect but the conscience was eman- 
cipated, and when men had learned to know 
the height, the depth, and the breadth of 
the word — liberty ! The discovery of new 
sources of wealth in the West, the diverting of 
the trade energies from the old Eastern high- 
ways, this and all the circumstances pointing 
to the downfall of the proud mediaeval repub- 
lics, were only acting under a more compre- 
hensive law of progress, which majestically 
moves on its appointed way through the 
centuries. The republics had lost their 
golden opportunity; and since they would 
not conform to the prevailing spirit, would 
not of their own will combine, and centralize, 
they were to be ground in the mills of the 
gods for three centuries, until they were 
fused, every trace of the old rigid land- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 199 

marks obliterated, and Italy prepared to be 
a homogeneous nation. 

In 1499 a new energetic king, Louis XII. 
of France, invaded the peninsula, in alli- 
ance, not with the intriguing Duke of Milan, 
but with Ferdinand, the King of Naples, with 
whom he was to divide the spoil, the Pope 
consenting to the unholy league. The work 
was quickly accomplished, and then the 
crafty Spaniard took all the fruits of the 
victory for himself, and ruled Naples and 
Sicily under one crown. The aggrieved 
Louis turned to the Emperor Maximilian. 
They formed an alliance to subjugate Venice, 
Louis seemingly unconscious that a Charles 
Y. was soon coining on the stage, who would 
be joint heir to the German Empire and 
Spain, and the overwhelming rival of France. 
So by 1515 Spain, France, and Germany 
were trampling over the soil of Italy, the in- 
fatuated states the while pursuing their petty 
animosities just as before, each still thinking 
only of its own peril or advantage. 

Alexander VI., the Infamous, had died by 
a cup of poison which it is said he and his 
son Cesar had prepared for some trouble- 
some cardinals. This may not be true. But 
one crime more or less makes little differ- 



200 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

ence in the record left by Cesar Borgia, 
which has probably not been exceeded even 
in Italy. He it is who is held up by Machia- 
velli as the perfect specimen of the art of 
statecraft. It was Cesar Borgia alone who 
satisfied the artistic sense of this fastidious 
anatomist of political villany. With no 
vulgar impulsiveness, with perfect self-com- 
mand, he could be deliberately cruel with 
definite ends in view. With a steady hand he 
could assassinate his brother, or strangle a 
group of friends, not because he disliked them, 
but because they were an obstruction. It was 
the splendid intelligence of his cruelty which 
charmed Machiavelli, the supreme subtlety 
with which he established himself in the 
seat his father carved out for him, and 
played his game for power with Spain and 
with France, by bribes and promises, and 
perfidy within perfidy, meeting every ob- 
struction, not with coarse violence, but with 
quiet stranglings, and poison, which he 
would compel his agents to administer for 
him, and then execute them for the crime with 
a show of indignation. His cruelty was never 
purposeless, but intended to terrify and thus 
to subjugate. There was this intention even 
in that famous incident, when he entertained 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 201 

his father and sister Lucrezia for an after- 
noon by shooting arrows at condemned 
criminals brought into the court of the 
palace for that purpose. He knew the tem- 
per of the Italian people, and that terror 
accomplished more than blandishments, and 
in anticipation of his father's death, he was 
firmly establishing himself in his new terri- 
tory. 

Such was the man held up by a sagacious 
Florentine patriot as a model for the imita- 
tion of Lorenzo, in ruling a republic ! 

Alexander VI. was succeeded by Julius 
II., a man with fewer vices and larger 
ambitions. At first favoring the alliance 
against Venice, he became alarmed for his 
own kingdom, and conceived a plan of a 
federation of all the Italian states, which 
should then be ruled by his own progeny. 
With important European powers he formed 
a "Holy League," for the expulsion of the 
French and Germans, which led to the battle 
of Ravenna (1512). 

Julius is best remembered as a patron 
of art. He it was who created the Vatican 
museum. The Apollo of the Belvidere had 
been recently unearthed, and also the Lao- 
coon had just been found buried beneath the 



202 HISTOET OF ITALY. 

Baths of Titns. He employed Bramante to 
lay the foundations of St. Peter s at Koine. 
and then Raphael and Michel Angel o to con- 
tinue the work. It is his connection with the 
incomparable masterpieces of these two men 
which invests the name of Julius with inter- 
est. Michel Angelo's ,; Moses*' was one of 
the figures created for his monument. Leo X., 
who succeeded Julius in 1513, was one of the 
Medici family. He immediately employed 
the great sculptor to design and decorate 
the chapel of the Medici at Florence, where 
he had re-established the authority of his 
family. It was in fulfilment of this com- 
mission that the great work commemorative 
of Lorenzo de' Medici in that city was 
executed. 

The building of St. Peter's, the magnificent 
plans for its embellishment, the decorating of 
the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican, and other 
art projects, required a great deal of money, 
more than Leo could command. So he pro- 
claimed a sale of special indulgences and 
sent his messengers into Germany to collect 
the golden stream which was sure to come 
from this traffic in sin and crime. 

Martin Luther, originally a monk, but 
then a professor in the University at Wit ten- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 203 

berg, already burning with indignation at 
the impurities of the Church, wrote a sting- 
ing denunciation of this last infamy, which 
he nailed upon the door of the old Castle 
Church (1517). This seemed a small matter 
at Rome, but it was going to shake the 
Church to its centre. The smothered fires 
burst into an uncontrollable conflagration, 
and Europe was convulsed with the Refor- 
mation. 

While Protestantism was overturning 
Europe and wearing out the heart of the 
overburdened Charles V., in Germany, it 
made little difference in Italy. Charles, the 
grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, and 
also of Maximilian, in 1519 bore the weight 
of two crowns, his power extending over two 
hemispheres. He determined to settle mat- 
ters in Italy. He received his Imperial crown 
from the Pope, then as their master sum- 
moned the Italian princes to meet him at 
Milan. Florence was secured to the Medici, 
who were to rule under the title of Dukes of 
Florence. A Spanish viceroy was placed at 
Milan, and another in Naples, and the whole 
peninsula was left in a condition of inglori- 
ous servitude to his agents. 



CHAPTER IX. 

From 1530 to 1796 Italy has no history of 
its own. Would you know its perturbations 
and overturnings during three centuries, 
you must look for them in the histories of 
Spain, France, and Germany. It was the 
battle-ground for alien armies fighting over 
issues with which it had nothing to do, the 
people driven like dumb cattle before Haps- 
burgs and Bourbons and drinking the cup 
of humiliation to the dregs. Francis I. and 
Charles V. fought out their long battle 
on Italian soil. When Francis was taken 
prisoner and carried to Spain, and the army 
of Charles had possession, scaling ladders 
were planted against the walls of Rome 
(1527 a.d.), and again was that city the scene 
of horror, ravaged by a German mob, the Pope 
hiding in the castle of St. Angelo, while the 
worst passions of a ferocious and brutal 
army were let loose upon the inhabitants, 
rivalling in horror the sacking by Goths and 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 205 

Vandals. After this came another Medicean 
Pope, Clement VII., he who drove Henry 
VIII. into Protestantism by his indecision 
over the matter of the divorce, Catharine, 
the wife Henry wished to repudiate, being 
the aunt of Charles V., whom he must not 
offend. 

Again did the Florentines attempt a re- 
public, this time under a gonfalonier ap- 
pointed for life, and again were the Medicis 
driven out. Catharine, grand-daughter of 
Piero, son of Lorenzo, was the wife of the 
Dauphin of France, who upon the death of 
Francis I. would be Henry II. Until this 
intriguing family in alliance with despot- 
ism was expelled, there could be no liberty 
for Florence, so once more the city was 
closed upon them, only to see them soon 
return again as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, 
more powerful than ever. It was in 1580 
that one of these sumptuous Grand Dukes 
gave to Vasari the commission to build the 
gallery which connects the Uffizi and Pitti 
palaces. 

All this concerns sovereigns and pontiffs 
and princes. Of the people there is little to 
say except that wretchedness reigned. The 
plains once fertile and blooming were a 



206 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

desert — prosperity was destroyed and towns 
depopulated. The attempt of Genoa to 
establish a republic under Andrew Doria, 
a son of one of her ancient families, in 1528, 
was not unsuccessful. It continued in force 
until the French Revolution. Of just such 
unrelated fragments as these does the his- 
tory of this period consist. Nothing that 
happens seems connected with what precedes 
nor what succeeds it. Things done are just 
as speedily undone, the changes in the shift- 
ing scene, being no more significant than 
those made by the turning of a kaleidoscope. 
It is a story of ineffectual popes striving to 
cope with a deluge, and to reinforce the 
crumbling foundations of the Church ; and 
of waning cities trying to hide their de- 
cay, and to keep up the semblance of 
their ancient glories. The order of Jesuits 
was founded, and the Council of Trent 
solemnly proclaimed a statement of Catholic 
doctrine, intended to reform and yet to 
strengthen the authority of the popes, and 
the foundations of the venerated structure. 
After the abdication of Charles V. came the 
reign of his son, Philip II., the champion of 
the faith, reinvigorating the assaults upon 
Protestantism in his own remorseless fash- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 207 

ion, with his efficient aid, the Duke of 
Alva. 

The pontificate of Gregory XIII. (1572- 
85 a.d.) is marked by the reform in the cal- 
endar which was finally adopted by all of 
Christendom, except where the Greek Church 
prevailed, so that to-day Russia and Greece 
are twelve days in advance of the rest 
of Europe. This was the period of the 
religious wars in France, which were termi- 
nated when Henry IV. was received into the 
Church by Clement VIII. Pope Clement is 
also remembered in connection with the burn- 
ing, for alleged heresy, of Giordano Bruno, 
the most learned and distinguished scholar 
of his age ; and also with the torture and 
death of Beatrice Cenci, for the crime of 
parricide — an act which, although deserved, 
was never proved. 

The Duchy of Savoy, remote and unob- 
served, continued to grow. Her dukes, by 
ambitious marriages and by a silently aggres- 
sive policy, were becoming a power. The 
reign of Victor Amadeus I., who married the 
daughter of Henry IV., is remembered by 
the extinction of that religious sect called 
the Waldenses, a form of Protestantism, so 
named for its founder, one Peter Waldo. To 



208 HISTOBY OF ITALY. 

escape persecution these people had hidden 
under the shadow of the Alps in Savoy and 
Piedmont, where, unobserved, they built 
their villages, and worshipped unmolest- 
ed. After the Revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes, Victor Amadeus was ordered by Louis 
XIY. to compel his TTaldensian subjects to 
become Catholics, and between the armies of 
France and of Savoy, this picturesque and 
defenceless people were awakened from their 
dream and annihilated. It was soon after 
this that Louis also, upon a shallow pretext, 
bombarded and captured Gfenoa, converted 
its palaces into ruins, and then compelled 
the Doge and four chief senators to come 
in robes of state, kneel at his feet, and beg 
for pardon. When centralized authority had 
reached this point, it seems as if the time 
should have been ripe for something better 
than absolutism ! And that something was 
already on its way, and making good prog- 
ress, while Louis XIY. and Louis XV. were 
inviting the inevitable crisis which must at- 
tend overstrained authority. In the game 
of shuttlecock being played in Italy, when 
cities and states were tossed without ceas- 
ing from one to another, Xice was at this 
time also torn by Louis from Savoy, thus 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 209 

changing masters for the eighth time since 
1387! 

A vacant throne in Spain was for Italy of 
more importance than events nearer home. 
With the peace of Utrecht and the accession 
of Louis's grandson, Philip V., the astute 
Amadeus II.,. Duke of Savoy, still further 
strengthened his house by the marriage of 
his two daughters, one with the new King of 
Spain and the other with the Duke of Bur- 
gundy, son and heir of Louis XI Y. The 
settlement of this question of the Spanish 
succession at Utrecht, 1713, again upset the 
established boundaries in Italy. Spain had 
to give up Naples, which, with Milan and the 
island of Sardinia, was assigned to the disap- 
pointed Emperor of Germany. The Duke of 
Savoy, always on the winning side, in spite 
of the domestic ties uniting their families, 
had joined the grand alliance against Louis 
XIV. in the day of his decline. He had 
earned a reward, and so in the final distribu- 
tion a long-coveted strip of territory between 
Milan and Genoa fell to him, and also the 
island of Sicily, with the title of King of 
Sicily. This he was induced in 1720 to ex- 
change with the German Emperor for Sar- 
dinia, the regal title being changed to ' ' King 



210 mSTOEY OF ITALY. 

of Sardinia." It was in 1735, after the war 
of the Polish Succession, that Naples was re- 
turned to Spain and for twenty-one years 
ruled by Charles III., son of Philip V., and 
it was during this reign that the cities of 
Herculaneum and Pompeii were uncovered 
(1738 a.b.) after having been hidden for 
seventeen hundred years. 

One seemingly unimportant exchange of 
territory at the time profoundly affected the 
future of Europe. The island of Corsica be- 
longed to Genoa, and had for generations 
been struggling to free itself from the 
tyranny it hated. The impoverished and 
expiring republic in 1768, being in desperate 
need of money, sold her troublesome depen- 
dency to Prance ; and so the Great Corsican, 
Napoleon Bonaparte, instead of being born 
an Italian, as he would have been, or a Ger- 
man, or a Spaniard, as he might have been, 
was a Frenchman ! 

The French people were the most plastic 
and receptive of any European nation, and 
required a steady hand to govern them. It 
is the effervescent wines and the volatile 
drugs that have to be tightly corked ! But 
while kings and ministers could repress the 
manifestation of discontent, they could not 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 211 

prevent its existence, nor the increasing 
volume of vicious energies it generated. 
The problem set for each succeeding reign 
was to find the amount of external force 
required to imprison the forces within ; each 
reign needing an increase of rigidity on the 
surface, and this in turn generating a greater 
volume of resistance from below, where de- 
structive energies were looking for opportu- 
nity to escape. Such was the process from 
the death of Henry IV. to Louis XVI. 
Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XI V"., great 
and wise though they were, seem to have 
been ignorant of one philosophic truth — 
that nothing that is rigid endures ! 

A handful of people across the Atlantic, 
because of infringements upon their rights 
and liberties which would have seemed small 
indeed in France, had been measuring their 
strength with England — had cast off her 
yoke and joined the nations of the earth 
as a free and independent people. This 
was an object-lesson which made despots 
tremble and which wrought changes terrible 
but beneficent. The catastrophe long im- 
pending in France came in 1789, shaking 
Europe to its centre. The reign of abso- 
lutism was passing, and the day ushered in 



212 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

by a Renaissance was approaching its high 
d : on. 

Ir is characteristic of genius to see oppor- 
tunity where to others is only a blank. 
Xapoleon Bonaparte, ~i:h instinctive con- 
sciousness, saw the path to power. The air 
was vibrating with the word liberty. If he 
would capture the sympathies of France and 
of the world, he must move along the line 
of political freedom, The note to be struck 
is freedom for oppressed peoples. AVhere 
would he find chains more galling, servitude 
more unnatural, than in Italy \ It mattered 
not whether kings liked it or not. there was 
a power abroad stronger than kings ! 

Without money, with an unpaid, un- 
clothed army, he 'obeyed the inspiration. In 
1796. with the unexpectedness of a tornado, 
he swept down upon the plains of Lom- 
bardy. The battles of Lodi. Arcol 
were won, and in ten months Xapoleon was 
master of Italy, something no one man had 
been before since the fall of the Empire ! 
By the treaty of Canipo Forinio. Northern 
Italy was divided into four republics — the 
Cisalpine. Ligurian. Cispadane. and Tiberine, 
with their capitals respectively at Milan, 
Genoa, Bologna, and Rome. Yenetia, that 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 213 

is, Venice and its surrounding territory, 
was thrown into the lap of Austria, while 
what had been the Neapolitan Kingdom, or 
Southern Italy, had become the Partheno- 
pean Republic, with its capital at Naples. 
When we see what this young, inexperi- 
enced general accomplished as if by magic, 
how by a few phrases about " Liberty," and 
the " breaking of chains," addressed to Ital- 
ians, and a few startling victories addressed 
to the Austrians, he had in ten months made 
himself master of all Italy, we are filled 
with wonder — not so much that he did it, as 
that neither Spaniard, German, nor French- 
man, singly or in alliance, had been able to 
do it, although trying for three centu- 
ries. 

What an opportunity was here for this 
man, in whose veins there coursed only Ital- 
ian blood, to accomplish the dream of centu- 
ries — the unification of Italy ! But his am- 
bitions were too colossal for such an object, 
Italy was only the stepping-stone to a larger 
mastery. The people whose "chains" he 
had "come to break," were at once required 
to surrender territory, money, jewels, plate, 
horses, equipments, besides the choicest of 
their art-collections and rare MSS. In a pri- 



214 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

vate letter to a member of the Directory, Na- 
poleon writes: "I shall send you twenty 
pictures by the first masters — by Correggio 
and Michel Angelo." And later he says : 
' ' Join all these to what will be sent from 
Rome, and we shall have all that is beauti- 
ful in Italy, except a small number of objects 
at Turin and Naples ! " Pius VI., without a 
protest, had surrendered his millions of francs 
and his MSS. and his ancient bronzes, and a 
part of Romagna — the papal territory. But 
he absolutely refused to recognize the exist- 
ence of a " Tiberine Republic." Such recog- 
nition meant a renunciation of his temporal 
sovereignty. So the old man, trembling un- 
der the burden of years, was escorted over 
the border into France, where, after less than 
a year of captivity, he died (1799 a.d.). In 
1804, after having himself proclaimed Emper- 
or of the French, Napoleon came to Milan and 
placed upon his own head the Iron Crown of 
Lombardy. If Charlemagne was a successor 
of the Caesars, he was now the successor of 
Charlemagne, and Italy was his kingdom. 
He might do with his own as he liked. So, 
instead of consolidating, he broke it up once 
more into fragments. Eugene Beauharnais, 
his stepson, as viceroy of the Ligurian and 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 215 

Cisalpine republics (Lombardy and Pied- 
mont), wore the title, King of Italy. The 
throne of Naples he gave to his brother, Jo- 
seph Bonaparte, to be transferred to his broth- 
er-in-law, Marshal Joachim Murat, when 
to Joseph at a later time was assigned the 
throne of Spain. The Grand Duchy of Tus- 
cany became a kingdom of Etruria with a 
Bourbon prince upon its throne. Ancient 
boundaries and landmarks were obliterated, 
geographical lines of separation removed, 
political divisions redistributed and rechris- 
tened, so that mediaeval Italy had disap- 
peared. In other words, Napoleon accom- 
plished in Italy just what he did later in 
Germany. In breaking down the revered old 
enclosures and tyrannies, he performed in 
a decade the work of centuries, and swiftly 
prepared the soil for a new order of things. 

Pius YIL, like his predecessor, refused to 
recognize the authority of the empire in his 
papal territory, so he, too, was carried into 
France, and Romagna was declared a part of 
the French Empire. But the period of a Na- 
poleonic despotism was beneficent. Uniform 
laws were administered and equal rights con- 
ceded. Public works gave employment to the 
poor and public offices were open to all Ital- 



216 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

ians, while to Jews and Protestants was given 
protection. An honest effort was made to 
reform the wretched peninsula, although at 
the same time draining it of its wealth and 
its youth by taxes, and conscription for 
Napoleon' s colossal wars. 



CHAPTER X. 

By the year 1815 Waterloo had been 
fought, Napoleon was at St. Helena, and the 
Allies were tearing down the temporary 
thrones and decorations. The proclamation 
of the Austrian general to the people of Italy 
in 1814, sounds as if it might have been 
copied from Napoleon' s in 1796 ! ' ' Italians ! 
You have groaned long enough under the 
yoke of oppression. We have come to free 
you. Behold in us your liberators ! Soon 
your lot will be envied. It is time the Alps 
should proudly raise an insurmountable bar- 
rier against oppression ! " In the following 
way were these promises fulfilled: The 
statesmen assembled at the Congress at Vi- 
enna as far as possible restored the worst of 
the old tyrannies, with the addition of a few 
new ones. The Neapolitan Bourbons were 
replaced on the throne of Naples, including 
Sicily as before. The papal sovereignty and 
territory were restored. The old Hapsburg 



■;:: 



; - - - 



E:isr irnri.ri :: :'_r <?:izz I>~:"_7 :: I7.5- 
:: --7— ?:-:_:. ;.'_.". M: iriia It." rjr-: :-f, :.~ :::_- 
:".t": T^irz: i^ilifs ^:. _ :t — :.- LtT\;:lt : : : 
Kil* V::::: I— an-rl I ":: Pirlzi-:. - •"_: 
ilsi'irreivri. Ll 3.1ii:i:-. :1- :rrri::ry :^ 
-::.^:_^ :: :"_r ^zioif::: ErT^hli: :: 'j-r::: 
Venice had already b^rii bestowed upon 
An a ::;:-. 7 Nap jleon — to this was n : ~ a li- 
ed Milan, malving Hie Lombardo- Venetian 
Kingdom. And the duchy of Parma was 
zl~~i. :: :i_r _=_■;. :".:;:. ?::::: rss M..ri-r L : " : — 
and Modena was restored to the Austrian 
tyiant Francis IV-, who had trampled npon 
it long before the Napoleonic era. So over 
a great region comprising the fairest and 
richest part of Italy was written the name 
of the Austrian Empire, and for the domina- 
tion of a Xapoleon there was substituted the 
dominion of Austria — the most autocratic 
despotism in Europe. 

Two parties arose in Italy, the Liberals and 
the CarbonarL The overthrow of Austrian 
tyranny was the object of both, the one by 
moderate measures, Lr Jthei irchistic. 
The Carbonari with tmly indefinite ideas of 
the form of government to be substituted, 
pledged themselves to obey their leaders, 
and if necessary by violence and treachery to 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 219 

accomplish their freedom. This contributed 
the unthinking element which served to 
keep alive the tires of revolt, while the Lib- 
erals more reasonably and intelligently di- 
vided upon the relative wisdom of con- 
stitutional monarchy, or a republic, and the 
question of the temporal rule of the Pope. 
In opposition to these two parties was cre- 
ated another, the " Sanfedesti," or uphold- 
ers of the Holy Faith, which taught absolute 
devotion to the Pope and death to Liber- 
alism. 

These were the three standards under 
which the battle was fought, while Austrian 
tyranny was striving to extinguish every 
aspiration toward liberty in the peninsula, 
the sovereigns in the states not absolutely 
hers being in fact simply her agents. When 
the feeble King of Naples yielded to a de- 
mand for a constitutional government, for 
which his people had been "teasing him," 
an Austrian army promptly appeared, took 
possession of the city, eight hundred Neapol- 
itans were condemned to death, and many 
times that number sent to prisons and the 
galleys, the executioners becoming exhausted 
in their tasks ! In this way was the promise 
made by the Austrian general in 1814 ful- 



220 HISTOKT OF ITALY. 

filled in 1820 ! In this way was " the yoke of 
oppression" broken by their ''Liberators! " 
At this same time (1820) there was a pop- 
ular uprising in Piedmont. The cities de- 
manded two things : a constitution, and 
freedom from Austria. King Victor Emman- 
uel I. was sternly forbidden by Austria to 
yield a single point. His people were in re- 
bellion. Rather than take up arms against 
them, he abdicated. In the absence of his 
brother, Charles Felix, his cousin, Charles 
Albert, was appointed Regent. The sympa- 
thies of the Regent were with the people, and 
he granted the constitution they prayed for. 
Charles Felix returned, repudiated the act, 
ordered his cousin to leave Turin and to go 
to the Austrian camp at Novara, where the 
officers received him with the shout intended 
to be derisive, but which was in fact so pro- 
phetic— " Behold the King of Italy ! " Vic- 
tor Emmanuel II. , the Liberator, and the first 
real king of Italy since Theodoric, then an 
infant one year old in his cradle, was the 
son of this Charles Albert ! The story of 
Naples was repeated. Instead of freedom 
and a constitution, death and imprison- 
ment and exile were liberally bestowed until 
"quiet" was restored in Piedmont. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 221 

In the Romagna there had been worse 
Popes than Leo XII. , but his ferocity may- 
be imagined when it is said that in the year 
1825 five hundred and eight persons were 
beheaded for real or suspected Liberalism. 
The month of August witnessed the heaviest 
part of this butchery, no less than three 
hundred executions taking place in that 
month, the list of victims including nobles, 
men of various professions, priests, and 
farmers. He also forbade vaccination while 
small-pox was raging, and set up the In- 
quisition to purge his kingdom of Jews and 
Protestants. 

The Ghetto, to which the Jews had long 
been restricted, was a district on the banks 
of the Tiber separated from the city by walls. 
From the frequent overflow of the river and 
from neglect, its condition was indescribably 
shocking. Within this enclosure all the 
Jews were locked every evening, never, even 
in times of inundation, being permitted to 
sleep outside. These unfortunate people 
were not allowed to forget that they were 
only the offscourings of creation ! At the 
opening of the carnival every year a deputa- 
tion composed of Jews were compelled to 
present themselves at the capital, kneel ab- 



222 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

jectly at the feet of the "senator," and ask 
if they might be permitted to live ! To 
which, after spurning them with his foot, 
the Christian magistrate answered with the 
usual formula: "Go; for this year we will 
tolerate you ! " The walls of this inferno, 
in which the unfortunate beings were con- 
fined, had become decayed, and the enforce- 
ment of the rules lax. So Leo XII. re- 
paired the Gfhetto and restored the waning 
discipline and the old order — as he would 
have done in every place where the air of free- 
dom was getting access, in the land he would 
have liked to carry back into medievalism. 
The Duke of Modena, Francis IV., was an- 
other incarnation of tyranny. When a con- 
stitutional uprising appeared in his duchy in 
the form of a mild request, he sent the fol- 
lowing note to the Austrian governor nearest 
him : "A terrible conspiracy against me has 
broken out. The conspirators are in my 
hands. Send me the hangman. Francis." 
In Bologna an uprising against the temporal 
authority of the Pope was successful — but 
the omnipresent Austrian was there in time 
to stamp it out. The teachings of the Sanfe- 
desti may be inferred by the following ex- 
tract from a manual introduced into Italian 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 223 

schools, entitled, "Duties of Subjects toward 
their Sovereigns." It proceeds in the form 
of a catechism, thus : Q. How should sub- 
jects behave toward their sovereign ? 

A. Subjects should behave like faithful 
slaves toward their master. 

Q. Why should subjects behave like 
slaves % 

A. Because the sovereign is their master, 
and has as much power over their possessions 
as over their lives. 

By such means as this did Austria try to 
secure the loyalty of a people chafing under 
her yoke, a people who were for the first time 
being drawn into a fraternal union with 
each other by the bond of a common hatred 
and a common aim — an emancipation from 
Austria. 

In 1830 the hopes of patriots everywhere 
were strengthened, when Charles X., the last 
Bourbon king in France, was driven out, and 
Louis Philippe, a constitutional king, as- 
scended the throne. There were at this time 
in Piedmont four youths whom Italy and the 
world could ill have spared ! The kingdom 
over which that lover of Austria, Charles 
Felix, reigned, was the birthplace of liberty. 
Mazzini, the so-called Prophet of the Revolu- 



22-i HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

tion, was born at Genoa, 1805 ; Garibaldi, its 
Soldier, at Xice, 1808 ; Cavour, its Statesman, 
at Turin, 1810, and Victor Emmanuel, the 
future " Re Galantuomo," also at Turin, in 
1820. Charles Felix, or Carlo Feroce (Charles 
the Ferocious), as he was derisively called, 
died leaving no heir. Charles Albert had 
the nearest hereditary claim, but his liberal 
tendencies made him objectionable. Prince 
Metternich, the Austrian Minister, tried to 
arrange a marriage which would bring the 
troublesome kingdom of Piedmont into sub- 
jection. If the daughter of the deceased king 
married Francis IT. of Modena, the Salic law 
might easily be abrogated, and Piedmont 
would have a safe conservative guardian in 
the Duke of Modena, the most arbitrary ruler 
in Italy. The plan was a very ingenious one, 
but Talleyrand, Minister to Louis Philippe, 
did not approve of it, and so it came about 
that Charles Albert, who since the affair of 
the Constitution, in 1820, had been quietly at 
home teaching his boys " to ride, and speak 
the truth," ascended the throne of his ances- 
tors. But, unhappily, Charles Albert had 
permitted his hands to be tied before he took 
the reins, by a promise to the dying king 
that he would not disturb the form of govern- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 225 

ment. Unconscious of this, Mazzini, believ- 
ing the time was now ripe, called together 
his "Young Italy," to meet the Austrian 
onslaught which would undoubtedly come ; 
never dreaming that the "king would hesitate 
to grant the Constitution he so readily be- 
stowed in 1820, as regent. The disappoint- 
ment was bitter. The army of " Young 
Italy" found itself fighting not the Aus- 
trians, but the liberal King on whom their 
hopes had rested. Executions and imprison- 
ments, and a price set upon Mazzini' s head, 
were the punishment for trying to force a 
constitution upon a king who was under a 
pledge not to grant it, a secret compact which 
was to make the early part of his reign in- 
comprehensible to patriots, and miserable to 
himself. But the time was coming when this 
well-intentioned and liberty-loving sovereign 
would free himself from the Austrian web 
spun about his throne, and would boldly 
ally himself with the cause of " Italy for 
Italians," 



CHAPTER XI. 

The fifteen rears of the pontificate of G-: 
orv XVI. was a Irear- 
—Mazzini in England, a: 



G-aric 


aliiiSor.:li 


__: ^"i, • T 


•oa^cS 






cient nnno_aer 


0~ JzL: 






ra rane. are ! 




WLo 


slioma ce se. 


recte; 




as 


ms sneces 


sir 


~as 


£ "- — ■ t-.j- - ^ -. -, -- _; 

Cardinal Fere: 


-- ^ .-, 


... .,. 


To 
ex] 


•- cnozce :e 


— 


a a :n 


it "as sail ~h 


.en a 


Or 


re: 


* iaa t a e c a m e 


ee 


r '.'.'■. in 


he exclaimed. 


' ' G-e: 


ntl 


.em 


_ n> what L: 


ive 


V 1 11 


done?" andth 


en :\" 


Lin 


ted 


. Aamaeim 


is. 


smil- 


hag a :>pe with . 
by tar people ~ 
dor hastening 


mn i 


V* 


1 


V-'7- Tor a 
na with, the 


Ea 


:per- 


or*s veto, ami? 


'ed :•: 




Lit 


e. PLas IX 


TT7' 


as in 


me chair of St 


. Pet 


ST. 


a" 


a I Lad cone 


mm 


need 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



227 



the pontificate which was to be a struggle 
between generous inclinations and what he 
considered his paramount duty as the cus- 
todian of the honor and sanctity of the 
Church, a natural dislike of foreign dom- 
ination feebly clashing with an unwilling- 
ness to take up arms against a state so in- 
flexibly loyal to the Church as Austria, and 
a determination that, come what would to 
the spiritual, the temporal authority of his 
office must be held intact. It was this eager 
grasp upon the temporalities which tainted 
all of this Pope' s mental processes, and which 
made the long pontificate of Pius IX., cov- 
ering one of the most critical periods, a tissue 
of unfortunate mistakes. 

The new pontiff came at a time when, more 
than ever before, the hands of Italian patriots 
needed to be strengthened. Poland had been 
effaced in her despairing struggle with Rus- 
sia, and Polish exiles were scattering seeds 
of rebellion wherever there were souls thirst- 
ing for freedom. There was something in 
the air of Europe which made despots un- 
easy. Patriots had grown bold not alone 
in Poland but in Hungary, and Italy was 
catching the contagion. Mazzini and Gari- 
baldi were watching from afar for signs that 



228 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



they might return and join in the rescue. At 
this moment the fall of the monarchy and 
establishing of a republic in France sent an 
electric thrill throughout Europe. It was 
the French mode of saying that their govern- 
ment should have aided the cause of freedom 
in Poland and in Italy, and a warning to des- 
potisms not to go too far ! News of an insur- 
rection in Vienna and the expulsion of Prince 
Metternich aroused the Milanese to make an 
attempt for their escape. "The time has 
come!" were the words with which they 
called upon the people to make a bold strike 
for liberty. Then it was that Charles Albert 
freed himself from his entanglement. A con- 
stitution was given to his people, and with 
his two sons, the Dukes of Savoy and Genoa, 
he threw himself into the struggle with Aus- 
tria for the freedom of the Lombardo- Vene- 
tian Kingdom. The patriotic contagion 
spread, Tuscany, and even Rome, and at last 
Naples, sending troops to defend their Lom- 
bard brothers and the frontier of Italy. This 
is the sort of thing that makes patriotism ! 
Never had a united Italy seemed so near. It 
needed only a great military leader — Napo- 
leon in a day could have made Italy free. 
But there was no Napoleon, and there came 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 229 

a defeat at Custozza, and then a retreat to 
Milan — one red-shir ted band of patriots, led 
by Garibaldi and Mazzini, stubbornly refus- 
ing to lay down their arms. 

Pope Pius IX. had not yet given his sanc- 
tion to the movement, although none doubt- 
ed that he would. Great was the shock when 
he issued an encyclical, April 29, 1848, say- 
ing he could take no part in a contest against 
Austria ! The cause had received a terrible 
blow. The excitement at Rome was intense, 
the Pope's Minister was assassinated, and 
Pius IX. fled in disguise under cover of the 
darkness to Gaeta, a fortified city on the 
coast near Naples. 

Charles Albert resolved to make one more 
effort for the expulsion of Austrian troops 
from Lombardy. He met a crushing defeat 
at Novara, March 23, 1849. The Austrians 
followed the retreating army into Piedmont, 
with victory still more overwhelming upon 
his own soil. Charles Albert, unable to en- 
dure his humiliation and disappointment, 
abdicated, before he left the battle-field, in 
favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel, leaving 
to younger and stronger shoulders the bur- 
den too difficult and too heavy for him. The 
youth of only twenty-nine upon whom had 



-3'J HZSTOEY OF ITALY. 

descended this burden, undaunted by defeat 

and by his father's 'despair, with set face 
looking out on the gloomy battle-field, lit- 
tered the words he was going to make trite 
after twenty-one years of unceasing effort — 
"And yet. Italy shall be ! " 

Austria was in high spirits, and her ef- 
ficient Greneral Haynau was despatched to 
settle matters with the people in Lombardy. 
The town of Brescia, which had also evinced 
a taste for liberty, received the first lesson. 
The details of the burnings, and whippings, 
and wholesale slaughter so horrified people in 
England, that on the occasion of his visit there 
at a later time, when he had still further 
distinguished himself in Hungary, a mob 
took him in charge and thrashed him until 
he was rescued by the police ; Tuscany, 
which now had its constitution and had been 
aiding in the war against Lombardy. was 
suddenly abandoned by her Grand Duke 
Leopold, who fled from Florence and joined 
the Pope and the King of Xaples at G-aeta. 
The astonished people implored him to re. 
turn, which he did only at a later time, when 
Florence was garrisoned by Austrian troops, 
and the constitution and all the concessions 
to the spirit of freedom had vanished. Mrs. 



HISTOEY OF ITALY. 231 

Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows" tells 
the story of Florence at this period, when a 
wave of returning despotism was the natural 
result of the overwhelming defeat of Charles 
Albert in Lornbardy. Patriotism again be- 
gan to hide its head, and the day of inde- 
pendence was farther off than ever. That 
antiquated despotism at Vienna believed that 
by fastening down all the valves, and per- 
mitting no steam to escape, the danger was 
averted ! An uprising in Naples was put 
down with horrible barbarities. Houses were 
set on fire and women and children leaping 
from the windows were butchered in the 
streets below, which were actually running 
with blood, the Bourbon King Ferdinand 
making not the slightest effort to stay the 
massacre. Austria with her new young 
King, Francis Joseph, had her hands full at 
this time, with a great rebellion in Hungary 
incited by Polish exiles. The Czar helped 
him to stamp out this fire which had been 
kindled by his own revolted subjects, .and 
then the vanquished Hungarian patriots 
were turned ov r er to Haynau to be taught 
loyalty to Austria. 

At this dark hour in Italy, and when aban- 
doned by the Pope, a temporary government 



232 HTST0EY OF ITALY. 

was formed at Borne, for the conduct of the 
war with Austria. Mazzini and Garibaldi aid- 
ing in its organization. The abolition of the 
Inquisition was its first measure. As the 
emancipated victims were borne out into 
the blinding sunlight, a great cry arose, 
'•'Down with the Pope ! Long lire the Be- 
public ! " It was many centuries since that 
cry had been heard in Borne ! 

A Triumvirate was elected by the Assem- 
bly, composed of Mazzini. Armellini. and 
Saffi. After years of waiting in exile. Maz- 
zini" s hour had come ! He was virtual dicta- 
tor of a Boman Republic. Calm, patient with 
opposition, never petulant nor melodramatic, 
his was not the low order of passion which 
expends itself in noise and fury. Extrava- 
gant he certainly was. and intense. But it 
was the intellectual and fine intensity of an 
idealist and an enthusiast, who knew no way- 
station between tyranny and perfect liberty ; 
no compromise with political expediency. 
In his hatred for Monarchy he would not 
have regretted the overthrow of a Constitu- 
tional Government in Piedmont, provided it 
could lead the people to rise in mass and 
to achieve complete Republican freedom. 
If he had hitherto been a dreamer of im- 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 233 

possible dreams, Mazzini's speculative ten- 
dency was now held in check by an impera- 
tive demand for the practical. The yonng 
republic must vindicate itself, must by 
its wisdom and its fruits prove its right to 
exist, and leave no pretext for intervention 
from jealous European despotisms. 

The Roman Republic with high hopes ap- 
pealed to England and to France to sustain 
it. Louis Napoleon sent 8,000 men to Civita 
Vecchia not to "sustain the republic," but 
to effect a reconciliation with the Pope ! It 
soon became apparent that French soldiers 
were there not as rescuers, but as jailers. 
While there was great satisfaction at Gaeta 
when news came that General Oudinot was 
attacking Rome, in France, so intense was 
the popular indignation, that Louis Napoleon 
was obliged to send M. de Lesseps to patch 
up a peace which would be acceptable to the 
Pope, to General Oudinot, to the republic, 
and to the French Assembly ! This difficult 
negotiation failed, Oudinot being determined 
to reinstate the Pope without conditions. 
Which presents the nobler picture — Pius IX. 
surrounded by emissaries from all of Europe, 
the centre of Machiavellian diplomacy, and 
rejoicing in a foreign invasion which was 



234 HIS TOE Y OF ITALY. 

mutilating the dome of St. Peters, and the 
gallery of the Vatican — or Mazzini and Gari- 
baldi and their small band of patriots, with 
desperate courage defending the city from a 
French army sent to coerce them back into 
servitude to Austria ! 

Garibaldi's 19.000 men. making up in en- 
thusiasm what they lacked in experience, with 
splendid valor for one month defended the 
city against 35.000 trained veterans. On 
July 3. 1S49, the brave leader was hastily 
summoned before the Assembly, and in an- 
swer to their question, was compelled to ad- 
mit that the defence could no longer be con- 
tinued. The Assembly ordered a surrender, 
then with stately gravity, and as if it were a 
dying bequest, they conferred Roman citizen- 
ship upon all who had aided in the defence 
of the republic, and after this their last act, 
solemnly and calmly, like the Roman Sena- 
tors of old at the first Gaulic invasion, they 
remained at their posts until they should be 
driven out by French bayonets. Then, be- 
fore the entry of the French army, Garibaldi 
assembled his soldiers, and dramatically in- 
vited whoever would to follow him to the 
end of the struggle. He said, * ; I have only 
hunger and danger to offer you, the earth for 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 235 

a bed, and the sun for a fire, let whosoever 
does not despair of the fortunes of Italy fol- 
low me!" Of the three or four thousand 
patriots who accepted these stern conditions 
and passed out of the gates of Rome that 
night, only a handful survived to witness 
Italian independence. Proclaimed as out- 
laws, most of them were captured and shot 
before they reached Piedmont. Garibaldi's 
faithful and adored wife, Anita, whom he 
had romantically married in South America 
and who insisted upon sharing his hardships, 
died from exhaustion by the way. Even at 
Piedmont the hunted patriot could find no 
safe asylum, and his wanderings did not 
cease until he reached America. 

It is a sad picture we have of Mazzini, pal- 
lid with suppressed excitement, and wander- 
ing aimlessly like one in a dream amid the 
wreck of his hopes, until hurried across the 
frontier by friends. 

Venice, which in the general uprising had 
declared herself a republic, was the last to 
surrender. The terrible Haynau with 30,000 
Austrians invested the city, in which 2,500 
beleaguered patriots held out until famine 
and pestilence compelled a capitulation. The 
triumph of Austria was complete. Every 



236 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

place in the fair peninsula, except that little 
state in the northwest, had given up the 
struggle. Pius IX., victorious and content, 
returned to Rome (1850), Cardinal Anton elli, 
the implacable enemy of free institutions, 
was appointed his chief adviser, and the brief 
career of the Roman Republic was over. 



CHAPTER XII. 

The reign of Victor Emmanuel II. com- 
menced in deep shadow. Not a ripple of en- 
thusiasm greeted his coming. At Turin, his 
capital, he was received with frigid coldness. 
His father was dying of a broken heart in 
Portugal, and there was nothing to make him 
glad but his Queen and his two little boys, 
Humbert and Amadeus. His army was de- 
moralized and chafing under defeat, his peo- 
ple bitterly disappointed and angry, an un- 
friendly parliament criticising his every act, 
with extreme radicals exasperated at his 
conservatism, and extreme reactionists de- 
nouncing the liberal tendencies which had 
brought ruin to the state. It needed a stout 
heart to take up the burden, and no little ad- 
dress to reconcile his people to the galling 
terms he had been obliged to accept — 20,000 
Austrian s quartered in Piedmont, and a 
heavy money indemnity to be paid. It is 
not strange that the young man of thirty 



238 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

years became grave and abstracted, and 
there came into his face that expression of 
deep sadness which grew to be habitual in 
after years. He one day told his Minister 
d'Azeglio, that of all the professions, that 
of king was the last he would have chosen. 
D'Azeglio replied, "But there have been so 
few honest kings, what a grand thing it 
would be to head the list as Ke G-alantuomo ? ' ' 
(Honest king.) The words struck "Victor 
Emmanuel' s fancy, and soon after when the 
Census-Register was brought him for his 
signature, under the head "Profession" he 
wrote — "Re Galantuomo," and thus gave 
himself the title by which he will always be 
remembered. 

The assumption of the title of emperor by 
Louis Napoleon in 1852 extinguished all 
hope of aid from France to the cause of free- 
dom in Italy, while it produced a corre- 
sponding elation at Vienna and St. Peters- 
burg. It was intimated to Victor Emmanuel 
that two systems of government on the pen- 
insula, one absolute and the other constitu- 
tional, was an "inconvenience" which Aus- 
tria and Prussia could not much longer 
tolerate. D'Azeglio' s spirited reply was, in 
effect, that the King was master in his own 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 239 

kingdom, and wished for no advice in what 
concerned the welfare of his people. 

When this able Minister gave up his port- 
folio in 1852, one no less able took his place. 
Count Camillo di Cavour had from his 
young manhood been identified with the Lib- 
eral Party. He was not impetuous, not a 
fiery leader of armed patriots like Garibaldi, 
not an impassioned dreamer like Mazzini. 
He was a wary student of men and of con- 
ditions, who with a patriotism no less intense 
than theirs was going to deal with the sources 
of things. If the force of the steam is neces- 
sary to drive the engine, the hand of the 
skilled engineer is no less needed to open or 
to close the valves as changing conditions 
demand. Garibaldi's headlong patriotism 
blazed the way to freedom, but that freedom 
and Italian unity would never have been 
consummated without the inflexible stead- 
iness of purpose and the calm, wise states- 
manship of two men, Victor Emmanuel and 
Cavour, his Minister. 

Perfectly in accord, these two determined 
at once upon a measure of reform in the 
Church which should include the suppres- 
sion of monastic institutions, and the amen- 
ability of the clergy to civil instead of eccle- 



240 HISTOKY OF ITALY. 

siastical courts, thus sharply defining the 
position of the King on the side of the anti- 
clerical party. Pope Pius IX., undeterred 
by these assaults upon his temporal author- 
ity, and wishing to proclaim his unimpaired 
supremacy, ventured upon an unprecedented 
act. When in 1854, alone, without the ad- 
vice of a Church council, he promulgated 
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of 
the Virgin, he made the first addition to the 
doctrine of the Church since the Council of 
Trent (1563 A.D.). 

All the conditions were thus becoming in- 
tensified. Not only between clericals and 
non-clericals was the chasm widening, but 
also the greater one between Austria and the 
King of Sardinia. A protest from Cavour 
on account of merciless severities carried on 
against suspected Liberals in Lombardy, 
who were pursued even into Piedmont, re- 
ceived no attention from Austria, and diplo- 
matic intercourse was broken off. The ad- 
vent of the Austrian Archduke Maximilian 
as Viceroy of the Lombardo-Venetian King- 
dom is interesting only on account of his 
subsequent tragic career in Mexico. Ap- 
pointed to take the post made vacant by the 
retirement of Field-Marshal Kadetsky, the 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 241 

interesting and accomplished youth brought 
his young and lovely bride Carlo tta, Princess 
of Belgium, to Milan. Two years were spent 
in the fruitless endeavor to do justice and 
show mercy, with a power behind him thwart- 
ing his large-minded and amiable purposes. 
Milan was only one of the way-stations in the 
pathetic life-journey of a prince unfitted by 
nature to represent a merciless despotism. 

The Crimean War was in many ways a 
crisis in the affairs of Europe. France and 
England in 1854 joined the Sultan in a war to 
prevent Russian encroachments upon Turk- 
ish soil. Victor Emmanuel hoped more from 
constitutional England than from any other 
source. It was true that Lord Palmerston 
had studiously refrained from giving even a 
moral support to the Italian cause, but a 
recent incident awakened hope. When the 
Duke of Genoa, the brother of the King, vis- 
ited England during the previous year, the 
gracious Queen Victoria presented him with 
a horse, saying : "I hope you will ride this 
in fighting the battles for the liberation of 
Italy ! " Significant and encouraging words 
to take back to his royal brother at that 
time ! One can only surmise that among the 
mixed motives impelling the King and Ca- 



&42 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

your to join in the struggle for Ottoman in- 
tegrity was a natural desire ro secure the 
friendship, and perhaps the gratitude, of Eng- 
land. But the astute Cavour also saw the 
advantage to little Piedmont from partici- 
pating in a great international war. It was 
a bold but successful move. When the King 
of Sardinia's contingent of 15,000 men re- 
ceived the congratulations of Queen Victoria 
after the battle of Tchernaya. and when at 
the Congress of Paris, where the treaty was 
signed. Piedmont was accorded the same 
footing as the five great powers. Austria re- 
alized that times and conditions had changed 
in the peninsula, and that her despised neigh- 
bor had been admitted to the circle of the 
great family of nations. 

The gallant young Duke of Genoa, who had 
expected to command the Sardinian troops 
in the Crimea, died of consumption while the 
war was in progress, leaving an infant daugh- 
ter. Margherita, who was to be the future 
wife of Prince Humbert and the adored Queen 
of Italy. When in one month the King lost 
his mother, his wife, and his brother, and was 
thus overwhelmed with private griefs, the 
Church construed it into a swift punishment 
for his wicked anti-clerical policy. Even 



HISTORY OF ITALY, 



243 



Cavour hesitated and urged a more gradual 
extinction of the monastic houses, earning 
by his moderation the hatred of the radicals. 
But Victor Emmanuel was firm and the fa- 
mous " Ratazzi bill " was passed. 

A visit to Paris, where the King was hon- 
ored with the most flattering reception from 
Louis Napoleon, and another to England, no 
less flattering, when Queen Victoria bestowed 
upon him the Order of the Garter, and the 
air resounded with his praises, doubtless 
strengthened the expectation of aid from 
those governments. But when all these be- 
guiling courtesies were over, the French em- 
peror could not be brought to a decision by 
the skilful Cavour, while Lord Palmerston 
frankly told him that England would not 
consider any proposition unfriendly to Aus- 
tria ! The blow had fallen. If Italy was to 
"be," she must work out her own problem of 
unity. The clerical party in the kingdom was 
growing and outnumbered the party of the 
King. " What will become of us," said Ca- 
vour, ' ' if they undo the work of eight years % " 
The King replied: "Rather than yield, 
rather than beat a retreat now, I would go to 
America and become plain M. de Savoie." If 
France would not aid them for love of their 



244 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

cause, she must be bought. The relations 
with Austria were becoming every day more 
strained. While massing 200,000 men on 
the borders of Lombardy, she was insolently 
protesting against the king's increasing his 
forces beyond what was required for a peace- 
footing. There could be no peace and no 
starting-point for Italy's redemption until 
Victor Emmanuel was King of all Northern 
Italy. 

Louis Napoleon needed two things to so- 
lidify his empire at home and abroad. He 
must have brilliant military successes to 
make Frenchmen forget the republic, and he 
must make distinguished royal alliances for 
his family to increase its prestige among 
other nations. A marriage between his cousin 
Jerome Bonaparte and the young Princess 
Clotilde, the daughter of Victor Emmanuel, 
just fifteen years old, was worth considering. 
So when privately sounded by Cavour as to 
the price he would ask for armed assistance 
to Sardinia, he named the two things most 
sacred and dear to the King, his ancestral 
duchy of Savoy and his daughter ! In re- 
turn for these, if the war was successful, the 
kingdom of Sardinia would include Lom- 
bardy and Venetia. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



245 



The King consented to the sacrifice, and in 
an address from the throne at Turin a few- 
days later he uttered words which were cor- 
rectly construed by an astonished Parlia- 
ment as an announcement that he was about 
to call the nation to arms. The people were 
electrified. The applause in Parliament was 
frantic, men springing to their feet and shout- 
ing until they were hoarse, " Long live the 
King ! " When he uttered the words, " we 
have heard the cry of anguish" {grido di 
dolor e), men wept, and grido di dolor e, words 
so eloquent of sympathy, and pity deter- 
mined rescue, were caught up as a watchword 
throughout the peninsula. Victor Emman- 
uel, no longer distrusted, had conquered the 
hearts of his own people, and was the hope 
of every patriot in Italy. 

The condition of the marriage was the one 
over which the King struggled longest, and 
not until his daughter 1 s free consent was ob- 
tained did he accede to it, his Ministers as- 
suring him the while that without it there 
would be no aid from France. So in the 
month of January, 1859, the nuptials were 
celebrated. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Italy was astir with expectancy and 
preparation. Francis Joseph peremptorily 
demanded that Victor Emmanuel should at 
once disband the Piedmontese army, allow- 
ing three days for a reply. This precipitated 
the crisis for which all were longing. Within 
a week the Austrian army had crossed the 
Ticino and a division of the French army 
was in Turin. Louis Napoleon, in his dra- 
matic proclamation, said he came to t; give 
Italy to herself." and that she was to be 
free "from the Alps to the Adriatic ! ,? 

"With such a glorious promise what won- 
der that Garibaldi's volunteers drove the 
retreating Austrians through the defiles of 
the Lombard hills, and that the field at 
Magenta was won with an overwhelming 
victory ! Never had Milan witnessed such 
a scene of wild rejoicing as when Louis Na- 
poleon and Victor Emmanuel, with their vic- 
torious armies, entered the city adorned as 



HISTOHY OF ITALT. 247 

for a bridal, with wreaths of flowers and gor- 
geous draperies of gold and silver brocade 
hanging from windows and balconies, the air 
ringing with shouts of a people rejoicing at 
their liberation. When the news of these vic- 
tories was received, Leopold, Grand Duke of 
Tuscany, Francis, Duke of Modena, and the 
Duchess of Parma all fled to the protection 
of the Austrians, and the three rejoicing 
states immediately offered their allegiance 
to the "King of Italy." All the states in 
the papal territory which were governed by 
papal legates — that is, all except Rome and 
its immediate vicinity — in similar manner de- 
clared their desire for annexation. Nothing 
could have been swifter or more spontaneous 
than this obedience to the principle of unity 
in a new Italy, every freed atom at once try- 
ing to ally itself to the central authority. 

In three weeks after Magenta came the 
crucial battle of Solferino. The fate of Italy 
hung upon that day — a day of long and des- 
perate struggle. When the sun went down, 
Francis Joseph had been defeated. The 
quarters he had occupied in the morning 
were occupied at night by Louis Napoleon 
and his staff, the Emperor of Austria weep- 
ing it is said over the ruin of his hopes. 



248 HISTOBY OF ITALY. 

The rest of the way was easy. There was 
now only Yenetia lying just before them, 
which there was no chance that the demoral- 
ized Austrians could hold, and the glorious 
promise would be fulfilled — Italy would be 
free "from the Alps to the Adriatic I " 

But it was the unexpected that happened ! 
Napoleon III., without consulting Victor 
Emmanuel, asked the vanquished Emperor 
Francis Joseph for an armistice. 

"But, sire," said his marshal, "an armis- 
tice means peace." 

"That is nothing to you," was the reply. 

"But, sire," persisted the astonished mar- 
shal, "you promised to make Italy free from 
the Alps to the Adriatic." 

" I repeat, sir, that is nothing to you." 

"No explanation was ever vouchsafed for 
this shameless betrayal of Italy by the man 
posing as her liberator ; the man who had 
said the night before Magenta, "Be soldiers 
to-day, to-morrow you will be citizens of a 
great country ! " 

With brutal abruptness and with the 
brevity of a dictator, Louis Napoleon made 
known his terms to Victor Emmanuel. The 
King of Sardinia might have Lombardy, but 
Venetia remained with Austria, and Savoy 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



249 



and Nice must belong to France. The peo- 
ple were frantic. ' ' We have been betrayed ! " 
they shrieked. 

"Betrayed and insulted," said Cavour. 
The Minister, usually so calm, so self-con- 
tained, paced the floor, his face white and 
drawn with the intensity of his anger. " Re- 
fuse Lombardy," he said to the King. "Bet- 
ter to cut loose from the traitor at once and 
let him take the consequences." 

The King alone was firm and calm. Pro- 
foundly disappointed, profoundly miserable, 
he yet saw clearly that the path of wisdom 
was in the decision he was about to make. 
When the stormy interview of two hours 
was ended, the terms of the French Emperor 
were accepted and Cavour had resigned his 
portfolio. 

And so the peace of Villaf ranca was signed, 
and the Emperor, Louis Napoleon, surprised 
at the coldness of his reception as he passed 
through the cities, returned to France im- 
pressed with the ingratitude of the Italians, 
to whom he had given Lombardy ! 

The study of human motives, always a com- 
plex and difficult one, is doubly so in a char- 
acter so inscrutable as Louis Napoleon's, 
where the straight path was never taken 



250 HISTOHY OF ITALY. 

and all things were done by indirection. 
Whether his amazing conduct was the result 
of political foresight and designed to prevent 
a European coalition against a too victorious 
France, or whether he concluded that two 
great victories were sufficient to give him the 
prestige he needed, none will ever be able to 
say. Statesmanship and philanthropy do 
not often go hand in hand in such transac- 
tions, but we do know that the parting 
effort of this " Liberator" was to force back 
Tuscany, Modena, Parma, and the Romagna 
into their old servitude to Austrian agents. 
On this point Victor Emmanuel was inflex- 
ible. He wrote to the Emperor : " We can 
succumb, but never betray. Rather than be 
unworthy of the love and confidence these 
noble and unfortunate people have reposed 
in me, I will break my sword and throw the 
crown away, as did my august father ! " It 
would not have surprised him at this junct- 
ure, if his late ally had joined with Austria 
to crush him. The situation needed steadi- 
ness and caution, and with admirable calm- 
ness and with perfect dignity he submitted 
to the cruel exigencies of a dangerous crisis. 
One can imagine how Garibaldi's heart was 
wrung, and how he impulsively resigned his 



HISTORY OF ITALY. #51 

commission in contempt for snch a cold- 
blooded king, and then as impulsively took 
it up again, vaguely intending to attack some- 
body, he knew not whom ; somewhere, he 
knew not how ; and then, impatient at being 
held in check, again threw down his sword, 
went to weep upon his adored Anita's grave, 
and retired to the little island of Caprera, 
which he had bought as a refuge with a 
small legacy left him by his brother. The 
fate of the central states was the first matter 
to be adjusted. Victor Emmanuel, with his 
usual calmness of -judgment, was slow to 
open the door at which they were knocking. 
There must be no loop-hole for suspicion 
which could be used against him by the wily 
agents of Austria, Prussia, France, and the 
Pope, who were whispering and conspiring 
at Naples to prevent the proposed annexa- 
tion. But it was the embittered reproaches 
of Pius IX. which most disturbed the King. 
He wrote assuring the Holy Father of his 
undying devotion to him as a spiritual ruler, 
at the same time respectfully protesting 
against his policy in temporal matters, in 
defeating the desire of his subjects for a 
constitutional government. But with the 
King of Naples, his trusted confidant, and 



262 



HISTOKY OF ITALY. 



with Cardinal Antonelli. his counsellor, both 
whispering encouragement in his ear, Pius 
IX. stood firm and earned the admiration 
of haters of liberty everywhere. As time 
passed, the European states, wearied per- 
haps, or it may be moved by the logic of 
events, relaxed in their opposition. It was 
finally suggested by Cavour that they 
should settle the matter by recourse to a 
" plebiscite, " a method in high favor with 
the Emperor of the French. The plan was 
accepted. A vote of the people in Tuscany, 
Modena, Parma, and the Papal Stares (those 
under legates) was overwhelmingly in favor 
of annexation, which was at once carried 
into effect. The temporal sovereignty of the 
Pope was now restricted to a small territory 
about Koine, and Victor Emmanuel was king 
of an Italy which extended not "from the 
Alps to the Adriatic." but from the Alps 
to the borders of the Papal and the Nea- 
politan kingdoms : an Italy which, as he 
said in his opening speech to his enlarged 
Parliament, was ;, not the Italy of the 
Romans, nor of the Middle Ages, but the 
Italy of the Italians." These borders did 
not satisfy the impatient patriot at Caprera. 
who was devising his own plans for their 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 253 

extension. Cavour, who had wisely resumed 
his portfolio, and had patiently labored 
with the Parliament to secure its consent to 
the treaty with the clause so odious to him- 
self — the abandonment of Nice — was never 
forgiven by the uncompromising soldier, 
who bitterly said, " That man has made me 
a stranger in my own house." It was a 
kind fate which gave to Victor Emmanuel so 
wise a counsellor in those critical years, of 
whom Prince Metternich said : " There is 
but one statesman in Europe and he is 
against us. That one is M. de Cavour." 

King Ferdinand of Naples, known as King 
Bomba, was dead and had been succeeded by 
his son, Francis II., because of his close imi- 
tation of his father's methods called u Bom- 
bina." So scandalous was the corruption 
in his government, so flagrant and so shame- 
less the methods of the despotism at Naples, 
that France, Spain, and even autocratic Rus- 
sia, urged him to pause and make peace with 
his outraged people before it was too late. 
We need not stop to tell the sickening details 
of imprisonment of suspects in dungeons, 
without light, without air, in an Italian mid- 
summer, fighting in the darkness with rats — ■ 
and this for a whispered criticism of the gov- 



254 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



ernment, or a suspected inclination to liberal- 
ism, or a desire to unite their fortunes with 
the new kingdom in the North. It is not 
strange that Garibaldi, chafing in his soli- 
tude at Caprera, was roused to a desperate 
resolve. 

This extraordinary man who had led the 
picturesque legion in the defence of the Ro- 
man Republic and had shown himself master 
of guerilla warfare in Lombardy, had also 
given no little anxiety to the King and Ca- 
vour. An eye had been constantly kept upon 
him since Novara, and a check-rein held al- 
waj^s in hand to arrest headlong dashes 
toward centres of tyranny, to which he was 
addicted at most critical times. But if his 
methods were displeasing to them, theirs 
were exasperating to him. Diplomacy he de- 
spised. He would have cut every knot with 
the sword. Equally frank in his loves and 
his hatreds, he was as transparent as a child. 
Generous, simple, ardent, he possessed in a 
superlative degree those qualities which 
arouse a passionate devotion, and which con- 
vert followers into worshippers. Tossed 
from Italy to America, from America back 
to Italy, and thence to South America, what- 
ever the vicissitudes of his life, it was always 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 255 

invested with a romantic charm. If he en- 
tered Montevideo as a drover of cattle, he left 
it the hero of daring exploits, of a romantic 
wooing, and the leader of armies against 
Spanish tyranny. If he was the maker of 
soap and of candles in Staten Island, he re- 
turned to his own land to accomplish the 
liberation of one-half of Italy by an act un- 
matched since the days of Roland or the Cid ! 

No soldier of fortune in the Renaissance, 
not Sforza, nor Carmagnola, cast a greater 
spell over his followers than did this red- 
shirted leader over his adoring veterans, as, 
in the same strange South American garb, 
they sat .at night about their bivouac-fires, or 
lassoed their untethered horses, apparently as 
undisciplined as wild colts, and yet alertly 
watching for a glance or a nod, and ready on 
the instant to do or to dare anything at his 
bidding. 

How Piedmont sympathized with the Nea- 
politans it need not be said. But a single 
move toward their emancipation might bring 
France and Austria in combination against 
the growing power of the King of Sardinia. 
Garibaldi had no fear of consequences and 
no policies to embarrass him ! His first 
purpose of recovering Nice was abandoned 



256 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 



for that of freeing the kingdom of Xaples. 
The Sardinian government wisely refrained 
from knowing much about the audacious en- 
terprise, and in I860, with his thousand vol- 
unteers, he embarked from Genoa. In two 
weeks he was inside the walls of Palermo, 
the people, frantic with joy. beating the bells 
with hammers all the day long, the royalists 
having removed the clappers to prevent such 
a demonstration of rejoicing. Garibaldi, 
now assuming the title of Dictator, pressed 
on, his little force growing with recruits and 
royalist troops melting away before him un- 
til he reached Messina, and the island was 
his. 

Francis II. was panic-stricken. He an- 
nounced instantly his intention of giving a 
constitution to his people, and also wished 
to form an alliance with Piedmont. It was 
a death-bed repentance which came too late. 
He told the Dictator he might have Sicily, 
and he would also give him 50,000,000 
francs to aid in the liberation of Venice, if 
he would leave the mainland alone. Victor 
Emmanuel, who had received an urgent letter 
from Louis Napoleon asking him to recall 
his imprudent general, wrote the Dictator 
that he thought they "should be content with 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 257 

Sicily," and instructed him to desist from an 
attack upon Naples. Garibaldi replied that, 
for just this once, he should disobey his 
orders, adding, "but when I shall have 
made you King of Italy, I will lay my sword 
at your feet, and obey you for the rest of 
my life." So, almost without money, except 
Mazzini's last 30,000 francs which he sent 
Garibaldi to convey his troops to Naples, 
and with a handful of men, and by sheer au- 
dacity and force of purpose, the kingdom of 
Naples was swept to the feet of the King of 
Sardinia. Austria, bankrupt and harassed 
by the Hungarians, offered no opposition, so 
there was no pretext for interference from 
Louis Napoleon. Francis II. for a time 
held out at Gaeta, that old refuge for tyrants 
in extremity, then with a proclamation full 
of pathos, and with a dignity worthy of a 
better cause, he disappeared from view, 
dying in obscurity at Paris in 1895. 

The 80,000 Neapolitan troops had disap- 
peared like the snow before the sun. When 
Garibaldi entered Naples the people acted 
as if they had gone mad. For eight hours 
he had to appear and reappear on the bal- 
cony in response to their wild shouts and 
clamor, until from sheer exhaustion he had 



258 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

to retire for rest. Then like little children 
they whispered, "Our father sleeps," and 
hushed and silent went about the streets 
holding their hands high above their heads 
with one finger pointing upward, a panto- 
mime which had the glad meaning — "Italy 
is one!" 



CHAPTER XIV. 

While this was taking place, Victor Em- 
manuel was attacking an enemy nearer home. 
Probably knowing the time was favorable 
for the undertaking, he sent an envoy to the 
Pope, respectfully but positively demand- 
ing the retirement of the foreign troops 
which he had called to his aid under General 
Lamoriciere. Pius IX. refused to consider 
the request. Without hesitation, the King 
sent troops down into the papal territory 
and after a short campaign Lamoriciere and 
his foreigners were driven out. Catholic Eu- 
rope was much scandalized by such a pro- 
ceeding. Austria and Prussia and Russia 
joined in a chorus of angry protest, Louis 
Napoleon withdrew his Minister from Turin, 
and even from Gaeta there came a feeble 
little voice — that of Francis II., late King of 
Naples. 

It was toward Gaeta that the King's army 
turned when matters were settled with 



260 HISTOET OF ITALY. 

Lamoriciere and Ms men. Near Naples 
Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi met for the 
first time since the wonderful achievement. 
As they clasped each others hands, Gari- 
baldi, his voice choked with emotion, said, 
"King of Italy!" To which the King 
simply answered, i ' Grazie ! ' ' (thanks) . Then 
later gratefully telling the gallant soldier 
that his daring had hastened Italian unity 
by ten years. To which Garibaldi replied, 
" But, Sire, it could not have been done had 
not Victor Emmanuel been the most noble 
and generous of kings ! " 

Hoping for a republic no less eagerly than 
Mazzini, Garibaldi always yielded his own 
ardent and impatient desires to the necessi- 
ties of the situation, while Mazzini, never 
diverted from his lofty ideal, hating a mon- 
archy almost as much as he did Austrian 
tyranny, had for years embarrassed the 
government at every step. Again and again 
had he kindled revolutionary fires, leaving 
behind him a trail of conspiracies and re- 
volts, followed by executions and exile, seri- 
ously damaging the cause for which he would 
have been glad to die. So this hour of exul- 
tation was one of bitterness and defeat to the 
brooding and disappointed idealist. When 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 261 

the more plastic Garibaldi, finding a repub- 
lic was impossible, bestowed his splendid 
prize upon King Victor Emmanuel, the great 
opportunity was lost ! 

A plebiscite was taken and the desire of 
the people was unanimously expressed for 
annexation. So the soldier laid down his 
Dictatorship, left to Victor Emmanuel the 
kingdom he had captured, then returned to 
Caprera, as someone happily says, "to dig 
up in the fall the potatoes he had planted in 
the spring." It is an amusing picture we 
get of the hero' s home — of his red shirts and 
gray trousers hung over a rope stretched 
across his bedroom, and a framed lock of 
Anita's hair hanging over his bed, and — 
most delicious touch of all — his three don- 
keys in the courtyard, named respectively 
Francis Joseph, Louis Napoleon, and Pio 
Nono ! 

In 1861 Victor Emmanuel opened his new 
Parliament, representing all of Italy except 
Venetia and Rome. It was only twelve years 
since Novara — since unloved and unwel- 
comed he came to Turin, and now, the centre 
of the hopes of the nation, he was "By the 
grace of God, and by the will of the people 
(the addition is his own), King of Italy ! " 



262 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

His was not yet a bed of roses. The task 
imposed by the enormous addition of illiter- 
acy and of helplessness and crime was not a 
simple one. The new census revealed the 
appalling fact that out of the 22,000,000 sub- 
jects now ruled by Victor Emmanuel, 17,000,- 
000 could neither read nor write, while brig- 
andage, incited and encouraged by royalists 
and by the agents of Francis II. , prevailed to 
a frightful extent in the newly acquired ter- 
ritory. Cavour grasped all these difficulties 
and problems with the hand of a master, not 
the least of his tasks being to keep in check 
the irrepressible Garibaldi, always in conflict 
with sober methods, never forgetting that 
Cavour had given Nice, his native city, to 
France, and losing no opportunity to re- 
proach him with words not easy to bear. 
But with sublime patience Cavour bore it all 
and strove to bring order out of a chaos 
of financial, military, and economic affairs, 
these complicated by the ever-persistent ir- 
ritation arising from a Pope at Rome sup- 
ported by a French garrison. The strain was 
prodigious, and within a year Cavour showed 
signs of breaking under it. It was with over- 
whelming grief that Victor Emmanuel stood 
at the bedside of his dying Minister in 1861. 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 263 

"Better for Italy if it were I who had died ! " 
were his words when all was over. 

The impatient leader at Caprera was in the 
meantime planning a settlement of the vexed 
Roman question. When the King heard that 
he was in Sicily raising an army with the 
watchword "Rome or Death!" he immedi- 
ately sent an armed force to stop the reck- 
less proceeding. Garibaldi, wounded by 
Italian soldiers and under the displeasure 
of his King, in the very territory he had 
bestowed upon him, presents a spectacle 
confusing to the sensibilities and to the 
conscience of beholders ! But it was an ad- 
ditional proof of Victor Emmanuel's calm- 
ness of judgment that he could deal promptly 
and wisely with a situation so painful. And 
a general amnesty proclaimed upon the mar- 
riage of his daughter, Maria Pia, with the 
young King of Portugal, relieved him of the 
necessity of punishing the soldier to whom 
he owed so much. 

This reckless attempt increased the com- 
plication at Rome, Louis Napoleon strength- 
ened his garrison, and Pius IX. took a fresh 
hold upon his temporal sovereignty. And 
when there came a petition signed by priests, 
praying the Holy Father to yield to the 



264 



HISTOET OF ITALY. 



entreaties of his children and make peace 
with Victor Emmanuel, Cardinal Antonelli 
scornfully replied that his Holiness made no 
terms with robbers, and so could not treat 
with the "Robber King" at Turin. The 
new ministry went on with the work of 
reform. Schools were established, and a 
railway, that messenger of civilization, ex- 
tended all the way down to Brindisi, the 
ancient city of Brundisium, just as the 
Appian Way that messenger of an an- 
cient civilization had done long centuries 
before. 

If Garibaldi had left his beloved Italy 
once more under a cloud, the cloud lifted 
when he arrived in London, and was given 
an ovation such as few heroes have received. 
He found himself the idol of the hour, and 
children and young maidens, in England 
and in America, were wearing the scarlet- 
flannel blouse which bore his name. Per- 
haps it was this voice of approval which 
encouraged the reckless hero again and 
again to make the attempt, from which he 
only desisted when he saw his infatuated 
boys mowed down by French chassepots 
at the gates of Rome, having accomplished 
nothing except to greatly increase Victor 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 265 

Emmanuel's burden by rendering negotia- 
tions with Louis Napoleon impossible. 

By the year 1866 the situation in Europe 
had been changed by the advent of a new 
and potent factor. Count Bismarck believed 
the time was ripe for Prussia to throw off 
the Austrian yoke, that antiquated assump- 
tion of headship which was the last surviv- 
ing relic of a "Holy Roman Empire ! " The 
old despotism at Vienna was much shaken 
since its conflicts with Hungary and Italy, 
and was not carrying things with so high a 
hand as it used to do. Bismarck rightly 
judged that a war at this time would result 
happily for Prussia. It mattered little what 
it was about. Fortune favored him by a 
dispute over the Danish duchies of Schles- 
wig and Holstein, Austria claiming Hol- 
stein as her share of the spoils, after the 
defeat of Denmark by Austria and Prussia 
in 1864. So war was declared, Bismarck in 
advance having made a secret alliance, offen- 
sive and defensive, with Italy. Prince Hum- 
bert and his brother Amadeus, Duke of 
Aosta, did valiant service, but the Italians 
were badly beaten at Custozza. This was of 
little consequence, however. The event so 
long desired was coming through an unex- 



2Q6 HISTOEY OF ITALY. 

pected door. The Austrians were totally 
defeated at Sadowa. Louis Napoleon was 
asked by Francis Joseph to act as mediator, 
receiving from him at the same time Venetia, 
to dispose of as he would. Here was an op- 
portunity for the amende honorable. Sev- 
enty years before the great Napoleon had 
given the hapless Venice to Austria. Louis 
Napoleon himself had bitterly disappointed 
the Italians in failing to recover it in 1859. 
Now, seven years later, he offered it as a 
free gift to the country so wronged. So, 
with the consent of Count Bismarck, which 
Victor Emmanuel made a condition of its ac- 
ceptance, Venetia was at last joined to Italy. 
Now there remained only the Eternal City 
from which came the grido di dolore. Eu- 
rope was getting very tired of the subject of 
the "Papal Captivity." The relations be- 
tween Austria and the Vatican had become 
less intimate, and as Francis Joseph with- 
drew his active sympathies from Pius IX. he 
made friendly overtures toward Italy. Pius 
IX. while promulgating his new dogma of 
Papal Infallibility (1870), and thus increas- 
ing the defences about his position, still 
made it plain that it was only the man 
who claimed to be King of Italy to whom 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 267 

he refused Ms friendship ; that for Victor 
Emmanuel, the King of Sardinia, he felt the 
deepest regard. At the same time Victor 
Emmanuel lost no opportunity to assure the 
Holy Father of his undying devotion to him 
as the spiritual head of his kingdom and of 
Christendom. In the midst of these inter- 
changes and the general softening of embit- 
tered hearts, the end was approaching, as it 
so often does, from an entirely unexpected 
source. 

Napoleon III. declared war against Prus- 
sia. The balance had been disturbed by the 
humiliation of his old ally, Austria, and he 
was going to restore it by vanquishing the 
victor — this Protestant Prussia, which stood 
for all that he was not. In seven weeks 
came Sedan (1870). The French Emperor 
was a prisoner and the French Empire had 
ceased to exist. There was no longer a 
French garrison at Rome. 

In the correspondence which followed be- 
tween Victor Emmanuel and the Pope, one 
respectfully expressed his determination to 
take possession of his capital, and the other 
an equal resolve to yield it only to superior 
force. Pius IX. gave orders to his few 
French zouaves to capitulate as soon as a 



268 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

breach was made in the walls. That hour 
quickly arrived, and a white handkerchief 
fluttering from the point of a bayonet an- 
nounced that the end had come — that Rome 
was joined to Italy, and the unification 
which had been the dream of centuries was 
accomplished. 

In the altered European conditions not one 
state remained to protest against this climax. 
The French Empire had vanished, Prussia 
was now the ally of Italy, and when the Pope 
appealed to his old friend and champion, 
Austria, to protect him from this invasion of 
his rights and territory, the reply promptly 
came that Austria could do nothing to inter- 
rupt the friendly relations with Italy which 
she was happy to say had existed since their 
reconciliation. So Pius IX. proclaimed him- 
self a prisoner, and during the seven years of 
life remaining to him never stepped beyond 
the precincts of the Vatican. By what is 
known as "The Law of the Papal Guaran- 
tees," the sovereign pontiff is accorded royal 
honors and a revenue of $645,000. His 
person is as inviolable as the King's. The 
Vatican and Lateran palaces, with their 
grounds and all the works of art contained 
in them, are for his exclusive use, as is also 



HIST0KY OF ITALY. 269 

the Castel Gandolfo, his summer palace. 
These places are sacredly his own. No offi- 
cial under any circumstances can enter them 
without his permission. The jurisdiction 
thus afforded by the Papal Guarantees is 
over the church proper ty in the city of 
Rome, and six suburban sees which were re- 
served by the government for the papal use. 
To these limits is the "temporal sovereignty " 
of the Pope restricted. 

In 1869 a son was born to Prince Humbert 
and Margherita, the charming cousin he had 
married the year before. The boy was chris- 
tened Vittorio Emanuele and received the 
title of Prince of Naples. The King' s other 
son, Amadeus, Duke of Aosta, had been in- 
vited to fill a vacant throne in Spain and had 
commenced his dreary experiment of playing 
the part of Re Galantuomo in that country. 
In July, 1871, the royal residence was re- 
moved from the temporary capital at Flor- 
ence, and amid great rejoicings was estab- 
lished at the Quirinal palace in Rome. An 
incident is described in connection with this 
event which brings into strong and pathetic 
relief characters who have since passed off 
the stage of human events. Emperor Fred- 
erick of Germany, at that time the adored 



270 HISTOKY OF ITALY. 

Unser Fritz, had been invited to make one 
of the party at the Quirinal on that occasion. 
When the royal family appeared npon the 
balcony he impulsively snatched np the lit- 
tle prince, who is now the King of Italy, and 
to the terror of his mother, held him np high 
in his arms in view of the tnmnltnons, shout- 
ing throng below. 



CHAPTER XV. 

One by one the principal actors in the 
drama of Italy's unification dropped by the 
way. In 1872 Mazzini, the irreconcilable pa- 
triot and the " prophet of the Revolution,' ' 
died at Pisa. In 1879 an unexpected and 
stunning blow fell upon the people. Victor 
Emmanuel was stricken with a fatal illness. 
Pope Pius IX., deeply moved, sent word 
that he was only prevented by age and in- 
firmities from coming himself to administer 
the last rites, which he sent a cardinal to per- 
form. Princess Clo tilde and Amadeus were 
quickly summoned, but arrived too late. 
The Re Galantuomo was no more. A cry 
of poignant grief ascended from the whole of 
Italy. People wept as for a father. King 
Humbert' s proclamation, issued a few hours 
after the death of the King, closed with these 
words: " Italians — Your first King is dead. 
His successor pledges himself to prove to 
you that constitutions do not die ! " Modern 



272 HISTOET OF ITALY. 

Eome had witnessed nothing like the scene 
at the funeral as their dead King passed from 
the Quirinal to the Pantheon — the '•'Iron 
Crown of Lombardy" borne on a cushion 
behind the coffin. 

Just one month later Pius IX.. the ''pris- 
oner of the Vatican," was dead, and. lying 
in his splendid vestments, was borne to St. 
Peter's, and placed in the niche which for 
thirty-two years had been occupied by 
Gregory XVI. Cardinal Pecci. who was 
chosen by the conclave, took the name Leo 
XIII. and commenced the pontificate which 
still continues. The course pursued by Pius 
IX. has not been materially altered. Leo 
XIII. is still the a prisoner of the Vatican," 
and performs no religious ceremonies except 
in the Sistine Chapel and in St. Peter's. 

The splendid intelligence of this Pope, and 
the modernness of his intellectual spirit, 
have many times led the world to believe he 
was on the verge of tearing down some of 
the old walls of separation, and letting the 
currents of a modern world course through 
the veins of the- Church. But just as many 
times has the world been disappointed. Few 
men. be they popes, emperors, or kings, are 
strong enough to defy the traditions of the 



HISTORY OF ITALY. 273 

exalted place to which they have been called. 
Whether there has been such a conflict as is 
implied by this in the mind of the venerable 
and extraordinary man who occupies the 
chair of St. Peter to-day, no one knows. 
But to some it has seemed so. And it has 
also seemed that he has lost an opportunity 
of making his pontificate memorable by in- 
fusing a new life into the Church. The rec- 
onciliation with the King of Italy and that 
other reconciliation with the scientific spirit 
of the age which would so have advanced 
the interests of the Church and made this 
pontificate so memorable, have not come. 

The reign of King Humbert is too near to 
be treated historically, but the love he had 
won from Italy was attested when on July 
29, 1900, he was cruelly assassinated by 
the anarchist Brescia. A cry of horror and 
of grief arose from his entire kingdom. It 
was not an easy thing to succeed Victor 
Emmanuel, and Humbert had borne himself 
well for twenty- two years under trying diffi- 
culties. With no great sources of wealth 
such as are possessed by other lands, with 
an undeveloped peasant population dispro- 
portionately large, with a burdensome taxa- 
tion necessary to meet the expenses of the 



274 KL5T0EY OF ITALY. 

government, and with earthquakes, and 
floods, and cholera, the King of Italy had no 
sinecure. The national finances demanded 
wisdom in the rulers, and patient sacrifice 
from the people. The maintenance of a 
sovereign pontiff in royal state at Rome is 
a heavy burden for a state so encumbered to 
bear. And as their guest is an unwilling 
one. the usual compensations for expensive 
entertainment do not exist ! The many irri- 
tations growing out of this hostility between 
the Quirinal and the Vatican necessarily 
make the throne of Italy a very uneasy seat. 
For two luminaries to try to shine in close 
proximity to each other in a small corner 
of the heavens, would be a similar experi- 
ment. Rome is not large enough for two 
thrones, especially if one of these claims the 
earth ! 

A small cloud in 1S91 obscured the peace- 
ful relations which have always subsisted 
between Italy and the United States. Eleven 
Italians belonging to the secret society of 
the "Mafia " were murdered by an exasper- 
ated mob in ZSTew Orleans. It was discov- 
ered that only two of these men were Italian 
citizens., and the matter was finally adjusted 
by Marquis di Rudini and Secretary Blaine, 



HIST0EY OF ITALY. 275 

through the skilful mediation of Baron 
Fava, the sum of $25,000 being paid by the 
United States to the families of the two 
murdered men. The name Mafia is said to 
have come from the initials of the war-cry 
at the time of the Sicilian Vespers — " Morta 
Alia Francesi Italia Ancla." M. A. F. I. A. 
A mixture apparently of Italian with Sicilian 
dialect. The word Mafia has degenerated 
until it signifies any association for purposes 
of vengeance. 

Upon the tragic death of Humbert, the 
infant held aloft in the strong arms of 
" Unser Fritz " twenty-nine years before was 
King of Italy. While we are writing these 
words the bells in Rome are ringing and 
there is rejoicing at the Quirinal Palace over 
the birth of a daughter to the King and 
Queen Helena, his beautiful Montenegrin 
bride. 

Italy has had more than its share of rich 
human experiences, any one of which would 
have bestowed immortality. The list is 
an imposing one. A Roman Republic, a 
Roman Empire, the triumphs of her medi- 
aeval cities, when her merchant princes 
ruled the commerce of the world, the eman- 
cipation of human thought by the Renais- 



276 HISTORY OF ITALY. 

sance, the production of the world's mas- 
terpieces in art, and last of all, the most 
dramatic of modern epics, the struggle 
which resulted in the unification of Italy ! 
Bo the annals of the Italian peninsula record 
anything nobler than this achievement ! 



H. 81- 79 it 



















































- 

























































vr- 













fp^ ^ 









°*_ 



:ys 
















4? 






















^ 



V 



o " c x, 










*6 V 1 




JA3 79 

N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 



^ 




A V ^ 

^ • .... 



